The Vault #46: Eyes Without a Face

Since I just wrote up I Have a Stranger's Face, might as well throw in a freaky facial horror double bonus.  Less philosophical, more visceral, Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face is horror at its purest. Overwhelmingly creepy with a few big shocks along the way, Eyes was made in 1960, at the tail end of the "era of quality" in French cinema, where the screenwriter was valued over all else. Which is to say there isn't a whiff of New Wave artiness to be found; Eyes Without a Face is sleek, straightforward, bone-chilling entertainment.

Penned by A-team Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (fresh off adapting the all-time thrillers Les Diabolique and Vertigo), Eyes concerns itself with a classic horror movie archetype; the mad scientist with a fiendish master plan. Pierre Brasseur, probably best known as the romantic lead of Carne's Children of Paradise, plays the pudgy, paternal Dr. Genessier, a physician who runs a free clinic from his country estate and specializes in reconstructive surgery. His only hope is to better the life of his daughter, Christiane (Edith Scob), victim of a horrible car accident, left with the titular eyes, but no other features to speak of. Unable to lead a normal life, she is trapped behind a ceramic mask, which the doctor dreams of one day replacing with real human flesh.

Brasseur's character and performance separates Eyes from most films of this kind; Genessier is not the Nazi-informed eugenicicst trying to wipe out thousands of people. Instead, his aspirations are relatively small-scale; he dispatches his kindly nurse to kidnap women, so he may cut their faces off, and attempt to graft the skin to Christiane's exposed flesh. Though the women generally end up dead one way or another, Genessier does not revel in this fact; there is a compassion on display here purposefully designed to complicate the emotions of the audience. One scene, in which he cares for a small child in his clinic, was cut from the American release to reduce this confusion.

Where I Have a Stranger's Face focused on the deep implications of the face as personal identity, Eyes comments on the necessity of beauty in a shallow society, as exemplified by two bourgeoisie callously commenting on the doctor's weight, even while at a funeral. Christiane is a lithe, beautiful creature, and the doctor simply wishes to see her roam free and naturally; ironically, he keeps a dozen or so dogs chained up in a dungeon for his experiments. Like Aylmer in Hawthornes "The Birth-Mark", Genessier is driven to horrendous and destructive acts in the name of realizing perfect feminine beauty.

Scob, who appears in only one scene without the mask, delivers a phenomenally subtle performance. For a movie about an evil plot, there is remarkably little dialogue in Eyes, the most touching moments coming as Christiane mopes in her room, worthless in the eyes of the world, but also powerless to stop her father's cruel experiments, of which she is the guinea pig. Making a film with a passive and mostly mute main character was quite challenge, but Scob's otherwordly innocence makes for an effective and disturbing damsel in distress.

Franju was a movie buff, not a critic like his counterparts at Cahiers du Cinema, who would launch the New Wave at around the same time Eyes was released. His film is low on experimentation, and high on reverence; for Rudolph Klein Rogge in Metropolis, for Boris Karloff in Frankenstein, even for his minimalist countryman Robert Bresson. Eyes Without a Face is a short story about an ordinary man driven mad in his quest for extraordinary beauty - when those themes are realized through the medium of horror, it's a nice little surprise.

Every Inch a Classic: On the Waterfront

One fault of this this blog is that is takes certain films, movements and figures in cinema history for granted.   I try to point readers in the direction of films they may not have seen or heard of, while ignoring those dripping in critical acclaim and historical importance. Maybe it's because I zipped through the AFI 100 Years...100 Movies list in middle school, even then mortified by the canonization of Forrest Gump and Mr. Smith Goes to Washinton, that now I don't find it necessary to discuss Raiders of the Lost Ark or Some Like it Hot. Those films are a given; don't get me wrong, I could write about Vertigo and Dr. Strangelove and dozens of other films on that list all day long, but I don't feel like I have too much original to add.

With that prologue behind us, let me say this: Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront may actually be one of the top 20 American films, as stated by the American Film Institute in their updated list. A gritty drama from the Golden Age of epics and westerns, Waterfront doesn't have the epic symbolism or scale of The Godfather or Gone With the Wind. It isn't a historic technical achievement like Citizen Kane or 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's simply the story of Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando), a boxer-turned-dockworker who reconsiders his life when mob boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) knocks off another longshoreman to keep his stranglehold on the dockworker's union. Complicating matters is the fact that Terry's brother Charlie (Rod Steiger) is Friendly's right hand man. There's very little action in the film, just Terry's slow realization of the inglorious and rotten turn his life has taken; he famously insists that he "could've been  a contender" - here's the scene where Brando utters that famous line, plus a handful of other timeless gems:

Even if you've seen Waterfront a dozen times, you'll probably watch this whole clip. Notice Brando's faint smile when he says "no one ever stopped you from talking Charlie" or the truly disappointed "wow" when Steiger finally tries to muscle him, or Leonard Bernstein's brilliant score which goes from suspenseful to nostalgic to fatalistic in less than two minutes time. This scene, and Brando's performance, are why AFI gave such a high ranking to On the Waterfront (#8 originally). There are several films on the list (most notably Psycho, which I don't think anyone believes is Alfred Hitchcock's best work) lauded for just a few seconds or minutes of their running. If you think that's what makes Waterfront an indelible classic, you are dead wrong.

In the years and months leading up the the release of the film, Hollywood was going through the nightmare of Joseph McCarthy, whose blacklist ended or suspended the careers of some of Hollywood's brightest actors, writers and directors. Creative artists were called upon to rat out their friends in order to keep working - one former communist who chose to do so was Elia Kazan, a Turkish born theater director who was briefly associated with the Communist party. A collaborator and confidant of such luminaries as Clifford Odets, Lee Strasburg and Tennessee Williams, Kazan won best director in 1947 for Gentleman's Agreement, a social commentary about discrimination against Jews in America. In 1951, he introduced the film-going world to method acting with A Streetcar Named Desire, the breakthrough of Marlon Brando. In 1952, he named names, and then began working on On the Waterfront. Many people to this day criticize Kazan's film, which ultimately glorifies Terry for ratting out his friends, in this case are not artists but mobsters, as justification for the director's own act of betrayal.

Years later, Kazan wrote that he, "had every good reason to believe the party should be driven out of its many hiding places and into the light of scrutiny." Former friend and fellow realist Jules Dassin, who moved to France after being blacklisted, insists Kazan did what he did to keep working, not out of moral outrage. Dassin is probably right; it does not compute that a man who hated communism would make a film with such an socialist message. Waterfront spends time focusing on the exploitation of the worker, and how the labor bosses keep unions down through threats of violence. It's funny that these themes are exact echoes of Dassin's Thieves' Highway, in which a boss (again played by Cobb) seeks to rob and cheat hardworking truck-drivers. This theme culminates in a sermon by Father Barry (an all-at-once fiery and compassionate Karl Malden), who calls every injustice on a dock another crucifixion. 


History has forgotten pro-union message of the film, with its ties to Italian neorealism, and there is an obvious reason why. Where De Sica and Visconti used non-professional actors, Kazan was working with Brando at his prime, about whom enough cannot be said. Whereas Streetcar was familiar to audiences from the stage, the immortal script Bud Schulberg provided for Waterfront (from a series of newspaper articles) afforded Brando more space to slip into character and improvise. From Terry's half-witted facial expressions to his timid and bashful interactions with love interest Edie Doyle (Eva Marie Saint), Brando realizes not just a player in a drama, but a human being in full.

It is the rare film where characters get to talk about their pasts, or how to train pigeons, and create compelling drama. Of course, Kazan's background was theater, so he has not trouble making "talk" compelling (see Baby Doll); but Waterfront explodes in violence and even action at certain moments to keep things moving. Chiaroscuro photography might remind us of noir, but the film is never overly grim. The plot, which is really just the development of Terry's thoughts and feelings, steers us from the loft of a freighter to the bowels of a church, showing us every aspect of his world, and thus, every influence on his decision. It's as pure a character study as has ever been put to celluloid, and as much of the credit goes to Brando for his performance, just as much should go to Kazan for capturing it. 


Though Brando might be the star pupil, Steiger, Cobb, Marie-Saint and Malden are all at the top of their games, thank to Kazan's theatrical background. Films about social justice (Erin Brockovich, To Kill a Mockingbird, Blood Diamond) often exist in their own alternate reality, where actors may be doing their best, but the scenario lets them down. With its groundbreaking location shooting and method acting. On the Waterfront is the landmark film of this genre. Beautiful and compelling, it has one more quality that trumps the rest: truth.  

The Vault #45: I Have a Stranger's Face

An x-ray of a human skull addresses the audience directly in a claustrophobic 4:3 frame. The white bone chatters and turns in a tight box; simple, yet horrifying. As alien and unsettling as this image may be, it is the closest we will ever get to the true being of Okuyama, the protagonist of Hiroshi Teshigahara's 1966 masterpiece, I Have a Stranger's Face (re-released on DVD as The Face of Another). Mutilated by an industrial accident at a factory where he works as a pencil-pusher, we meet Oyukama after his original appearance has melted away, and all that remains are bandages. The x-ray is a luxury of the viewing audience; no one left in Oyukama's life can see him at all. Robbed of his identity and happiness, Oyukama agrees to be the guinea pig in a psychological experiment - have a face transplanted on to his body, and see which side will ultimately retain control - the inner self or the outer appearance.

The third collaboration between Teshigahara and revolutionary novelist Kobo Abe, Face is both science fiction and psychological thriller. Known for their audacious concept films, first the doppelganger ghost story Pitfall, then the Cannes-winning metaphor Woman in the Dunes, the writing partners faced a new challenge in Face. If the face is the window to the soul, Oyukama offers us nothing in the way of empathy - he coldly narrates his situation behind a wall of gauze. He is effectively another observer, a mound of flesh with no visual identity. Face is a movie about reconnection, about self-realization against impossible odds - through freaky science experiments.

Enter the "psychologist" (Mikijiro Hira), who offers Oyukama a way out - a synthetic face he can apply and remove at will, but which will be harder to take off the longer he keeps it on. The American title Face of Another is misleading - the doctor isn't offering another identity - its a wholly artificial mask. Oyukama goes from person without an identity, to an identity without a person.

Playing the mask, and by default, the lead of the movie, is Tatsuya Nakadai. By 1966, Nakadai was by far Japan's biggest movie star, working with every great director in a variety of roles. One commonality of Nakadai's roles just previous to Face is that they all embraced his larger than life movie star persona. Whether as the swaggering villain of Yojimbo or the wise and weary hero of Harakiri, Nakadai portrayed smart, fierce and mischievous characters. Brash, masculine, a man of action, Nakadai's face doesn't belong anywhere near the brain and body of Oyukama, a neutered functionary. Of course, if the face can tell us something about the soul, it can also tell the soul something about it.

While Oyukama plans to seduce his wife in the guise of a stranger, a great deal of Face explores the conflict between the man inside and the face he must show to the world to not seem a freak. Nakadai is transcendent as he learns how to emote anew, and eventually begins to embrace being a handsome movie star. Meta? just a little. Teshigahara heightens that effect by including a movie-within-the-movie about a pretty girl with similar facial disfiguration.

As the mask learns what its devilish features are capable of, Oyukama is terrified, only feeling like a normal human when his old invisible self. When one can walk in the world as an attractive, non-existent (on paper) being, of course nihilism comes up, which the doctor psychotically encourages - while sitting in a German themed bar.

I Have a Stranger's Face is notable for reasons outside of its story. While the idea might seem something out of the mind of Charlie Kaufmann, Teshigahara does a great job of instilling a modern day film  about modern alienation with the feeling of a baroque horror film. From the meticulously composed sets to the chilling doctor, Teshigahara brings together the high camp of Val Lewton (Cat People) with the gothic tropes of Mary Shelley. It's a strange mixture of old and new, as science buts up against humanity, and New Wave style clashes with classical methods of storytelling. It was one of Nakadai's first leaps from known quantities like Masaki Kobayashi and Akira Kurosawa to the next generation of visionary Japanese directors.

Face is about a man with no center who finds himself again, but in all the wrong ways. Cast off by his wife and family, ignored by society, then given the ability to commit evil deeds, there is no voice in Oyukama's life telling him no. He goes to the movies and sees no new religion, no guiding light. The final chilling scene, in which Oyukama is the only figure with a face, albeit the false one, represents not only the general conditions of modern life, but also quite specifically what celebrities like Nakadai (or George Clooney) go through to this day. In everyone's mind, they are a known quantity - yet inside, it remains a darkness.

The Value of a Second Look

Hypnotic, dream-like, temporal; going to the movies is an immersive and intense experience. It's amazing that we can decide whether we love or hate anything in the dark room, around a hundred other tensed bodies, waiting for the next pot to boil. Yet rarely does one go to a movie and leave without an opinion. I've found these opinions tend to be wrong, or at a minimum, unreliable.

You wait for a movie to come out. You've seen the ads, or if its an older movie, perhaps its reputation precedes it. It is the rare occurrence one sees a movie without any preconceived notions. I went to Kevin Costner's serial killer farce Mr. Brooks this way a few years ago - I thought it was hilarious and well-worth the price of admission, if only [SPOILER ALERT] to see Dane Cook brutally murdered by Fat Neck himself.

The first time I saw Throne of Blood, I rented it, watched it alone, struggling to pay attention to Kurosawa's take on MacBeth. Toshiro Mifune is at his swaggering best as Washizu, a warrior driven to murdering his master at the behest of his wife and a woodland spirit. As you can see, and may well know, Throne of Blood is beautiful, and its story classic, but it didn't do much for me. So I went to see it on the big screen last week to try and re-assess.

There are many types of expectations that can effect the first viewing of a film. When delving into a classic thats been on your list for a long time, especially from a legendary director, their other work is inescapable. This can be both good and bad. In the case of Throne of Blood, it falls significantly short of Kurosawa's other Shakespeare adaptations, the epic Ran (King Lear) and corporate thriller The Bad Sleep Well (Hamlet). You can't watch Casino and not think of Goodfellas.

Benefit of the doubt tends to break the other way with new movies, especially long-awaited premieres. Gangs of New York and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button were long gestating projects held for Christmas awards season. I'll give them a chance, but I'll never argue those movies were great, or ever will be. You go to the theater begging to be blown away; with Fincher, you pick up on every meticulous detail, trying to make a case in your mind that, yes, this is a good movie, and yes, I am enjoying it.


The Curious Case of Benjamin Button isn't Throne of Blood - it doesn't have an established reputation as noteworthy or quintessential. The fact that is possibly stinks is irrelevant. When you see a film long awaited (like Haneke's The White Ribbon was for me recently), objectivity goes out the window. The theater atmosphere creates most of the confusion. That clean carpet smell, the long lines on opening night. If its awards season, maybe you're there with a large contingent of family members. The point is, you can't possibly get an accurate read on any movie the first time.

Which is why I have to see There Will Be Blood and Mulholland Dr. again. They showed up on countless decade's best lists, but I haven't seen them since my first embittered, frustrated viewings. Mulholland Dr., which I experienced on video, already carrying a healthy disdain for David Lynch, never had a chance. As for Blood, long movies make me cranky late at night.

There's certainly a kind of movie favored in a once-and-never-again scenario - the blockbuster summer movie. Whether raunchy comedy or big-budget actioner, movies from May to August exist only for the first viewing, whereas Christmas releases and "thinking pictures" are meant to stand the test of time. Toeing the line, like Michael Mann does in Heat and Miami Vice, is a good recipe for disagreement among critics. An effects laden orgy like Avatar or Button plays with our emotions in the other direction. Heat is better than any summer movie - Avatar has less of a brain than most oscar fare.

Back to the points of this post - why wasn't Throne of Blood better in a theater? A Shakespeare adaptation set in medieval Japan requires the highest cognitive functions - it's more like reading a book than watching a movie. Seeing Throne of Blood in a sold-out theater was like trying to read A Tale of Two Cities in a crowded bookstore - I just kept looking around for a way out. The experience ratified that Throne is a movie with a few stunning moments, but is largely forgettable.

The point is, watch movies twice. And I don't mean go to Superbad twice in a weekend (as I once fatefully did). Try to make an opinion based on two very different experiences - a big tipoff will be if the movie holds your attention at all that second run through. I had to learn this the hard way - turns out Risky Business is a lot more boring than I remembered.

The Vault #44: Z

Since the fall of the Soviet Union decreased the probability of full-scale nuclear war, the political thriller has lost some of its edge. Who controls the government isn't enough to hold the audience's attention - Hollywood has basically been making action movies (The Kingdom, Body of Lies) about Iraq - the best of these movies, The Hurt Locker, doesn't have an ideological bone in its body. The days of The Manchurian Candidate are largely behind us - I blame the internet. Or maybe we just assume all politicians are liars until proven otherwise, so there's no suspense anymore.

Anyway, it's refreshing to go back to the lynchpin of the genre, Costa-Gavras' Z (1969), to which countless American films, from All the President's Men to The Conversation and Taxi Driver, are indebted. All those films have had a lasting impact due to a universal truth: no one, no matter how powerful, straightforward or normal, can really be trusted. They owe their historical roots to the assassination of the 60s and Watergate, but the cinematic pedigree of all three (and countless others, including my personal fave Zodiac) is tied up in Z. 

"Any resemblance to real events, to persons living or dead, is not accidental. It is INTENTIONAL." So reads the title card of the film, based on the true story of the assasination of Greek reform politician Gregoris Zambrakis (here portrayed by ever-suave Yves Montand, who had his own radical tendencies). Zambrakis was killed by the government, in a roundabout way, and Z makes no mystery of it. Gavras has no intention of thrilling his audience with a whodunit; he's much more interested in the how and why. It's not unlike Fritz Lang's M, where a story ostensibly about a murder ends up telling us much more about the society than the lunatic himself.

If M and similar urban policiers (think Jean-Pierre Melville) are procedural, than Z is best described experimental, heavy on plot but light on exposition. Gavras makes the most of the frenetic camerawork of New Wave vet Raoul Coutard (Jules et Jim, Breathless, Le Mepris, Shoot the Piano Player and on and on), which roves omnisciently from the halls of power to the whispered meetings of local drunks. This renegade style coupled with jump cuts and the cacophonous score of Mikis Theodorakis give Z the pacing and atmosphere of action movie. And therein lies the brilliance; Z combines the left-leaning politics of political dramas like Salvatore Giuliano and Battle of Algiers with the bravado of A Fistful of Dollars.

So, that brings us back to the politics. Since fascists don't generally make films that question the government in place, Z must be a liberal film. However, one could hardly make that assumption from the way Gavras presents his characters. Montand, as the murdered reformer, is nothing more than a charismatic philanderer, and the chief investigator of the crime is a playboy news photographer (co-producer Jacques Perrin) who seems to be playing both sides for maximum chaos. Though Perrin's character might seem the most fitting for the protagonist, the voyeur having roots in film noir, the third act largely settles on a milquetoast civil servant played to perfection by Jean-Louis Trintignant, called in to fill out paperwork and clean up the mess.

What makes Z effective and lasting as a political film is that it doesn't take a stance one way or the other. The government may be responsible for the assassination, but Montand's supporters are just as happy to make a martyr out of their fallen hero; in a way, the death benefits everyone. And, of course, in the end, no one in power really has to pay the price. All the President's Men might be a story about investigative journalism, but it will always ultimately be "the movie about Watergate", whereas Z can tell story of many different reformers cut down in their prime (American audiences in 1969 had several to choose from). It relays the sense of helplessness and confusion many feel in the world of politics - we want to change the world so much, but in the end, all we can do is take a picture.

Whose Decade Was It? Director of the 00s

It would be ridiculous to try to objectively decide who was the overall best director of the decade. You might say the director with the most films, or the director who took the most chances, or the director of the best single film without considering other, lesser works. This exploration of directors is a means of getting to what this decade was all about, both commercially and artistically (read this item from /Film if you haven't already). So, sorry Malick and Fincher, but we're going to look at some guys who were critical darlings more than one time, and at least some select audience favorites. 


I wrote the above paragraph thinking this post would deal with several directors, mostly rehashing films from my favorites like the Coens, Scorsese, Von Trier, Verhoeven, Fincher, etc. But that wouldn't be telling you anything new. First we have to get to what this decade was ultimately about with respect to the cinema. The piece in /Film talks about Avatar and Memento, how those films encourage fantasies about slipping into constructed, unrealistic world rather than our own. The 00s are, in effect, characterized by a move away from verite films. From Dogville, which shoots a poignant drama in a barren airplane hangar, to Spider, where a mental patient confuses his journal entries with the physical world, this decade was about losing track of what was going on around us - focusing on the glowing rectangle. In light of this, there is only one appropriate choice for auteur of the decade.

After the mumblecore jigsaw puzzle Following was released straight to DVD, Christopher Nolan found a budget and a couple of B+ list stars for his first feature in America, Memento. A stunning work of narrative deconstruction, the film has not aged particularly well, but the inventiveness on display led to Nolan's wildly successful career in Hollywood.

Memento is dated in some ways - say, by Guy Pearce and Carrie-Anne Moss. However, it depicts a man stripped of his life and his ability to be productive by a loss of his memory. What remains, interestingly, is his drive for vengeance or, from his perspective, justice. Leonard Shelby constructs a fantasy world in which he is the hero, the vigilante who will find the wrong-doers and bring them to justice. This sounds more like the plot of a comic book than an independent film about a man mourning the loss of his wife. In the way that Fight Club was inadvertently ahead of its time about credit card companies, Memento presages this decade's obsession with graphic novel heroes.

It's funny that many people consider this film to be a neo-noir and Nolan himself to be a "dark" director. Lenny's fantasy is what we all want, just in a twisted form. We all construct worlds in which our actions are proof of our worth - it's called the internet, and you're reading my world right now (again, how much credit can we give to Chris and his brother John for writing something with implication they never could have intended?). Memento is fresh, but it also wasn't too arty - it was a big hit for a Sundance movie. The next logical step was to sign Nolan to a fat contract at Warner Brothers, and force him at gunpoint to needlessly remake Insomnia. The less said about this the better. Nolan was a good soldier, and was then able to take on his next big project.

Now, Spiderman might have been the comic-book movie that kicked off the orgy of profit that the genre would garner Hollywood in the 00s, but Batman Begins is the gold standard of origin stories for new franchises going forward (see Star Trek - as a point of reference; do not actually see Star Trek).

Does anything else really need to be written about The Dark Knight? Nolan blew the doors off of the blockbuster, combining Batman's setting and characters with the naturalistic acting and photography of a Michael Mann crime drama. He got riveting performances out of actors playing comic book villains - ever seen Batman Forever? This is no small feat. The Dark Knight will probably remain the exception to the rule, the movie that happens to be based on a comic book as opposed to the comic book unfortunately masquerading as a movie.

Nolan's most overlooked film of the decade is The Prestige, a high budget think-piece in which the director ruminates on his dual identity, first as a purveyor of entertainments, second as a serious artist. People may have confused it with The Illusionist, or scoffed that a movie with Scarlett Johannson and Hugh Jackman involving magic was not a romantic comedy, but make no mistake, this is Nolan's best film. Like Memento, the film unfolds three dimensionally, eschewing linear storytelling, instead taking us hyperlink-style from one plot-point to the next.

It was a decade dominated in pop culture by the internet. Christopher Nolan found a way to combine the changes in the modern cognitive processes with classic storytelling techniques to make the definitive films of the decade. His films were never too hard to understand, or so simple that they were trifling. Composed, considered, and delivered, Nolan is the finest young filmmaker at work today. Inception comes in May.

Month of Haneke Premiere: The White Ribbon

To put it as simply as possible, Michael Haneke is a "controversial" director. Occasionally, his films garner widespread critical acclaim; most of the time, they do not. There is no question that Haneke is a master storyteller - it is his subjects and his methods that sometimes draw questioning. Works like 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance and The 7th Continent sought to alienate the audience from the drama before them; Cache, Funny Games, and Benny's Video pointed a finger at them directly. In general, the Austrian's films seem constructed for maximum discomfort; it's no wonder that in setting aside some of his well-documented ideologies, Haneke has produced his best-received film to date.


The White Ribbon is Haneke's first period piece (set in 1913, just before the outbreak of WWI), and his first film in his native language of German in over ten years. He does himself a great service by getting the obvious out of the way in the opening voiceover, which ends, "the strange events that occurred in our village...may cast a new light on some of the goings-on in this country". Okay, this movie is about Nazis, or more broadly, the people who would prop up fascism in the coming decades.

The White Ribbon is symbolic on a grand scale, covering the change in mores from the Bizmarck generation to those born in the early part of the 20th century. Set in the countryside, where change comes last, it reveals the decay of social mores at every level, from the baron's manor house to the lowly peasant's dinner table. Covering the history both before and after its actual period, it ingeniously finds its narrator in the schoolteacher, who is neither young nor old at the time of the events, and thus gives the most thought to them.


And what is the story? A doctor is sabotaged on the way back from an equestrian competition, killing his horse and breaking his collar-bone; a child of nobility is kidnapped and whipped with reeds; a barn burns down, and a cabbage patch is destroyed. Each of these events on its own would be narratively insignificant, but put together, they form a web of unease and impending terror. The title refers to a piece of cloth the pastor ties around the arms of his children to remind them to be pure and good - everyone seems to need a bit more reinforcement than that. The misdeeds begin piling up so fast in this unnamed town that Haneke doesn't have the time to put them all on screen (which only serves to make what we do see all the more horrifying).

What it all comes back to is the kids, who we know will eventually be at least complicit in the 20th century's greatest evil. Who failed to get through to them? It's certainly ironic that the school-teacher, who spends the most time with them, seems so aloof and absent for a great deal of the film (that he's falling in love doesn't improve his job performance). It's clear the children are slipping away, but Haneke keeps their performances, and the actions of their characters, in relatively subtle territory. There's no savage rape scene a la Dogville (a similar evil-in-a-small-town piece) pitch-fork-wielding mob. From the farmer's children to the doctor's, no one seems to have a connection to or respect for the past.

You'll hear this called Haneke's best film over and over again (I still think Cache is probably better); the main reason for that praise is the acting. He gets half a dozen children to nail their roles perfectly; imagine what the professionals are capable of. From the disenchanted pastor (Burghart Klaussner) to the cruel doctor (Rainer Bock), every townsperson feels fully realized, even those that only appear for a single scene. The White Ribbon is Haneke's most human film because, well, it focuses on the humans, not abstract ideas. Like I said, the Nazi stuff is a subtext left very much in the background; you might think about it before and after the film, but very little during.

Haneke had been playing in his corner of sandbox for so long, we just assumed he would never change. Ribbon catches us completely by surprise - it bears the stamp of classic European cinema like Dreyer's Day of Wrath and Bergman's Fanny and Alexander. It operates on an epic historical and emotional scale we would associate with Steven Spielberg or Akira Kurosawa. That's not to say the Austrian has the sunny world-view of those directors, but The Whire Ribbon certainly doesn't feel like an inscrutable, cold art movie. There's two dozen characters, breathtaking cinematography (in digital black and white) and an important universal message. It's Haneke stretching his legs and swinging for the fences.

That isn't to say it's unrecognizable. There are plenty of wide-angle master shots with no dialogue that stand in for legitimately dramatic moments in the story. And, as mentioned, a lot of the key action takes place off-screen. Both of these tactics, age-old Haneke conceits, leave plenty of mystery in The White Ribbon, and reason enough for a second and third viewing. As much as we might not understand by the time the credits roll, what we can grasp is moving enough to merit a return visit.

Review - The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

No modern director's career has been as star-crossed as that of Terry Gilliam. Uncooperative studio heads, malfunctioning sets, and general bad luck (see Lost in La Mancha if you want to know what happened to that long-gestating Don Quixote project) have made the former Monty Python animator's output sporadic at best. His latest effort is no different. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus marks the final screen appearance of Heath Ledger, who died midway through filming.

Setting aside the unfortunate circumstance of the film for a moment, Parnassus is Gilliam at his purest, as psychedelic fantasy film with a pitch black sense of humor. Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) is an immortal wiseman with an Eastern flair who travels the globe with his sideshow "imaginarium", a mirror which allows patrons to enter a magical world of their own creation. In each constructed world, the subject must choose between the hard road to good, or the easy path to temptation. Why the dichotomy? Because Parnassus is in an eons-old struggle with Mr. Nick (Tom Waits) aka Satan, a struggle that involves not only the fate of the world, but also the fate of Parnassus' daughter, who must be given to Mr. Nick if enough souls are not saved. That's a mouthful, only complicated by the entrance of the mysterious Tony (Ledger), an amnesiac stranger who introduces some new ideas to rope onlookers into the game.

Reuniting with writing partner Charles McKeown, Gilliam is firmly in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen territory. Parnassus is an out-of-touch old man who doesn't bring a specifically religious message; he only believes in the imagination and the importance of storytelling (he comes from a cult that must continuously tell the eternal story, or else the world will end). All that is to say, it's not too hard to talk about how Gilliam is Parnassus and vice-versa. Just like Parnassus, the arrival of a handsome young stranger (Ledger), allowed Gilliam to tell his story to a wider audience. Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics, Imaginarium secured a whopping 30 million dollar budget once Ledge was attached.

One might think Ledger's death would have thrown up an impossible roadblock to ever completing this opus - think again. With the enormous amount of money already spent and enough of the conflict in the film existing between Waits and Plummer, Gilliam found a way for the show to go on. He cast three similarly popular actors (Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell) to complete Ledger's role, and had Tony only appear in the fantasy world part of the film.

How well does this really work? In Depp's case, rather well. Unfortunately, because all this was done last minute and squeezed into other filming schedules, Captain Jack Sparrow couldn't stay to complete the role. Jude Law treads water in one highly comical sequence, but the film really unravels when Colin Farrell has to act the climax, in which Tony becomes a completely different character than what we've seen before. Of course, its not fair to criticize on account of Ledger's death. It might be fair to say that the visual effects are stuck squarely in the 90s. Fantasy films are aimed at children, and this one certainly takes on cartoonish aspects. It might be a visual feast, but not one for a very discerning palate. Having just seen Avatar, it was hard to ignore the rudimentary green screen effects used in nearly half the shots in the film.

In the end, Doctor Parnassus is a very interesting footnote, but the lack of Ledger's persona in the third act slows the action down to the crawl and makes the film into a "look, it's Tom Waits!" cameo trudge. You don't ever want to make a movie where Verne Troyer is a highlight, but he seems to be the only one both alive and committed to the bit. Doctor Parnassus may see story-telling as essential, but the disrupted ramblings of a drunk old man can be maddening to follow.