The Vault #62: Black Narcissus

Akira Kurosawa and Howard Hughes have at least one thing in common; they both employed meteorologists full-time on feature productions to tell them when the perfect clouds were approaching. Martin Scorsese once said in an interview that he decided to make Raging Bull in black and white because he couldn't find boxing gloves to match the color they were in the period the film took place. David Fincher made it rain for 3 straight months in southern California while shooting Se7en. It's the unavoidable obstacle of filmmaking - though it is an artistic undertaking, it does not happen on a blank canvas or a motionless piece of clay. The director and his crew are trying to tell a self-contained story, sometimes even create a wholly independent world, and all the while the limits of their control are tested; by actors gaining weight, by budgetary concerns, by acts of God. Of course the eternal human struggle against insurmountable natural obstacles is not just exemplified in the search for the perfect light; Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger explore the futility of similar endeavors in Black Narcissus.


The palace at Mopu, known as "The House of Women" for its pre-colonial function, sits high on a Himalayan precipice 8,000 feet above the valley floor. At the behest of the local warlord and his English laiason Mr. Dean (David Farrar, a pre-Thatcher Jon Hamm), the brothel is to become a convent, under the watchful eye of the anti-libidinously named Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr). Religion, colonialism, men, women - the symbolism is deafening even before each white-frocked sister takes her turn ringing the 6 a.m. church bells, literally staring into the abyss. However, Black Narcissus foregoes the obvious thematic concerns of such a situation - Powell and Pressburger aren't concerned with the clash of savagery and civilization at the cultural, geographical or spiritual level. Theirs is an internal, psychological struggle.

Raphael's The School of Athens depicts, among other things, Plato pointing towards the heavens, advocating his philosophy based in forms, while Aristotle looks to the ground, rooting his beliefs in empricial fact. Well, it doesn't get much more real than that chasm. Each nun's reaction to ringing the bell, most notably Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) and her fire-eyed stared, charged by equal parts sexual frustration and morbid fascination, underscore the power of that cliff. These aren't your lifers anyway - the sisters of St. Faith (as the palace is re-christened) renew their vows year to year. This is not a question of being a nun, but of continuing to be a nun - the debate between the Holy Father and the drop is an ongoing one. The presence of the dashing Mr. Dean, and his passive and imagined flirtations with Clodagh and Ruth respectively, only seeks to complicate these matters of faith.

These battles of up and down, outer and inner, appearance versus reality are nothing new to Powell and Pressburger. In I Know Where I'm Going, Wendy Hiller plays a kept woman, instead of by her vow to God, by her engagement to a wealthy Scot. She eschews the long-sought image, not marrying him for reasons of geography, technology and, of course, love. Farrar would reunite with P+P a few years later for The Small Back Room, in which he played a self-destructive alcoholic with the preternatural ability to dismantle bombs (and save England!) under intense pressure. The most famous films from this pair, The Red Shoes, is an epic tragedy in which a poor young girl's life is literally sacrificed for the sake of a particularly moving ballet. So Sister Clodagh sacrifices, repressing all her low impulses, for a higher purpose. It is ironic that all of the inspirational majesty of the setting was created indoors, at Pinewood Studios.

These omnipotent angles, the sweeping vistas, come from nothing but careful execution. Most of the process shots are completed with the very canvases Kurosawa refused to use, with colors Scorsese was so frustrated searching for in nature. And therein lies the experience of Black Narcissus; that of being in a Renaissance painting, but not one that seeks to bring glory to God. Religious fervor is all well and good, but there must also be human prudence and organization mitigating our relationship with the Almighty. There are more than a few pointed close-ups of the indigenous holy man, never leaving his perch on the mountain side, having no effect. In comparison, the sisters of St. Faith seem like they're punching a clock. They may look down, but only from a balcony, not the heavens.

Of course taking the vows of nun asks more of human nature than other vocations. The life these women choose is one of constant belief and duty, or failing that, the upkeep of the appearance of those qualities. At the highest altitude on earth, away from all they have known, they might be tempted to boil over. One such occurrence allows P+P to abandon this rather subtle film in favor of white-knuckle gothic horror. Alfred Hitchcock may have been taking notes on this flashy break in atmosphere, which acts as the exclamation point on an otherwise understated character study. Allow them this one transgression.

Enter the Void

Perhaps by design, it would be impossible to begin a discussion of Enter the Void without first discussing uber-provocative auteur behind it, Gaspar Noe. Eight years ago, Noe emptied a screening of his second feature film, Irreversible, with nausea inducing ultrasound, dizzying hand-held photography, and the singlemost disturbing rape scene ever put to celluloid. What those particular horrors obscured was otherwise a quite admirable technological achievement; a film told in 10 unbroken shots, with performances and a screenplay that felt so improvised, so natural, the audience could do nothing but look away.  The camera stood at eye level, making us a primary character. The Cannes exodus was in many ways a proof of Irreversible's power; we weren't just watching a rape, we were, not so metaphorically, being raped.

Enter the Void is another piece of experiential experimentation, starting from the cacophonous credit sequence. After we recover from that barrage of illegible symbols and letters flickering too fast to read, we are welcomed in the conscious, literally, of the protagonist, Oscar (Nathaniel Brown); we're behind his eyes, hearing both his voice and his thoughts as he prepares for a night on the town. The town, by the way, is Tokyo, but not the one from Lost in Translation. Noe has taken the best (or worst, depending on your POV) parts of Tron, Blade Runner, and Sin City and jammed them all into one undulating nightscape, every conceivable object rimmed by neon light. An American hustler and small-time drug dealer, Oscar has paid for his sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta) to come live with him in this hell-scape. Unfortunately, but predictably, he's gotten her involved with the wrong kind of people; she strips and pops ecstasy at a sleazy club every night. The important part is that they are family, and all each other has, since the untimely death of their parents in a car accident when the two were still children.

We spend the first 30 minutes in Oscar's head, an unbroken shot (except when he blinks), as he follows his friend Alex to a club called The Void. Alex is, coincidentally, discussing the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and Oscar is, coincidentally, tripping on DMT. Much like the lengthy exposition in Inception  Just as this technique becomes tiring and you begin to feel queasy, Oscar is shot in the back of the head, in the bathroom of a bar called The Void. And just as Alex has been telling him/us, he/we floats out of his own body and "sees his whole life in a magic mirror". You probably weren't listening to Alex, just as Oscar wasn't; you were both more worried about the vertiginous staircase the two were descending while reincarnation was being explained.

Then it's time for a whirlwind ride through every event that brought us to this point, scord with ambient beats and shot completely with Oscar's silhouetted head in the foreground. This passage is the most cinematic in the film, using the various themes and lasting images as descants, musically weaved into the whole that was the protagonist's psyche and personality. Most prominent is the car accident, the grisly tragedy that fathered the smaller tragedies through The Void. We learn first hand how Oscar got into drugs, how Linda got a little too into Oscar, who betrayed him the night of his death, and why. Here we have the narrative backbone of a nearly three hour film laid out in an associative montage that represents only about a quarter of the total-running time. It's not unlike the logical portion of 2001: A Space Odyssey that we spend with the HAL 9000; it justifies the other passages, but hardly explains them.

It's only after the nostalgic reverie that Noe really starts to stretch his legs and explore the afterlife, sending the spirit-eye of the camera on a fly-over of this nightmare Tokyo. Here Oscar (what's left of him) wanders from his own body back to his sister's apartment, finds Alex hiding from the police in a graveyard. The camera is constantly from above; the ghost's, or god's perspective, and while events follow one another, this passive approach to storytelling makes the whole thing seem more random. Displays of emotion are primal, uncontrolled, tenfold as upsetting as if we were watching a Hollywood drama about someone dying young. The camera flies from scene to scene through light fixtures, open flames, and in one inspired turn of revulsion, an aborted fetus. Maybe if Oscar hadn't been smoking those chemicals, this death-trip wouldn't be so damned pyschedelic.

Gaspar Noe is a filthy sadist. He views human beings as vehicles for chemical highs, rage, titillation and little else. There is not and never will be subtlety in any of his films. What made Irreversible work was its highly stylized feel, and its relatively short time-frame. When trying to encompass an entire life and even human existence, Void falls short of profundity. However, stylistically and aesthetically, few films in the history of cinema can be said to be more daring, more hypnotic and more visceral than Enter the Void. We are sucked into it as we are a painting by Jackson Pollack, attempting to make sense of its movement and message but ultimately knowing such efforts are beside the point. Noe may favor lowlife characters, kinky sex and hallucinogenic visuals a bit too much, but Void does touch meaningfully on the universal mystery of death. Whether our own personal disintegration loops will feature as many neon tentacles, we will soon find out.

The Town

Blame Jennifer Lopez all you like, but the downfall of Ben Affleck was largely due to the actor being miscast in a series of big budget films in which he was supposed to be the lovable everyman. Everything from Armageddon to Forces of Nature presumed the dough-faced Boston native to somehow represent an all-American ideal of "the nice guy". The only problem was nice guys finish last (read: don't sell tickets), and Affleck had difficulty playing characters to whom he could not relate. His performances were dry, boring and too cute. Riskier roles like Shakespeare in Love and Gigli were amusing for unintentional reasons - they would have been better as one-liners on the resume of George Clooney. Where Affleck came from, what he knew in his bones, maybe have had some moral fiber, but was more blue collar and aggressive than the body of his work following Good Will Hunting. 


In order to stage his comeback, Affleck needed to return to Boston...behind the camera. Gone Baby Gone was a simple procedural about justice, guilt and remembering where you came from; little more than a Law and Order episode on the Charles River, but in that third element, the remembering, Affleck evoked a peculiar brand of honor and a whole ocean of regional pride few directors could tap into. Beantown is hotter in Hollywood than Jude Law circa 2004 - but Gone Baby Gone didn't do as well as some of the other crime movies lacking the letter "r". This time around, Affleck has forgone the subtle to make a big budget heist picture, a film that advertisements could accurately bill as "Heat meets The Departed".   

The Town opens clumsily, with two title cards giving us information that characters might through dialogue, were we not in such a rush to get to the action. First, bank robbery is a family business in the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston, so much so that the one-square-mile area has produced more robberies than anywhere else in the world. Secondly, that sort of criminal culture ruins lives. Participating in this age-old recidivism is Doug MacRay (Ben Affleck), the leader of a particularly effective crew. Doug's a good guy, you see - he's only  in the business because he owes his life to his hot-headed convicted man-slaughterer best friend Jem (Jeremy Renner) and to prove he's a tough guy to his father (Chris Cooper), who's serving five consecutive life sentences. When he begins falling in love with Claire (Rebecca Hall), a hostage the gang picks up on a job but conveniently cannot identify any of them, his loyalties become confused.  Thanks to the relentless pursuit of professional haircut and FBI Agent Jon Hamm, Doug's life, both as a free man and a living one, is put in jeopardy.

There is only one truly original element in The Town, and that is Claire, a do-gooder hipster of sorts who volunteers at the local Boys and Girls Club. The tension that arises between Jem and Doug over the latter's relationship with the hostage is less to do with the fact that she can put them all in federal prison and more related to Claire as a symbol of gentrification. One has to think that Affleck has made these last two films in part because he is concerned about this deracination of Boston, not just in real life, but also on the silver screen. There must be two dozen chopper-shots of Bunker Hill and nearby quarries, reminding us, the tourists, what the true face of the city is. The recently completed Tobin Bridge, an architectural gem that mimics European counterparts, appears in several of these scenes; it is telling, however, that when staging a high speed escape, our criminals choose a less aesthetically pleasing route. The same cannot be said for Jack Nicholson in The Departed.

Authenticity and home-town bias aside, the rest of The Town is fairly by the book. Jon Hamm gets a few scenes to act real tough and spit dialogue in an interrogation room. Affleck gets to be torn for a few minutes about whether to leave with Claire or stay with his one-time girlfriend (and more complicatedly, Jem's sister) played by Blake Lively. And oh yeah, some bad-ass heist sequences, none better than the much posterized caper in which the gang dresses as terrifying nuns with automatic machine guns. This scene matches the intensity and reality of Michael Mann or Peter Yates, as they desperately rip through the one-lane streets and T-junctions of the North End. The claustrophobia of this sequence recalls chase scenes set in Europe in Ronin and The Bourne Identity. The pre-Revolutionary layout of Boston's streets are just as ripe for action as San Francisco's steep hills.

All of this is to say that The Town is a very entertaining, if not spectacular, film. As much character and realism as Affleck is able to inject into this rather predictable story, he does not yet have the stylistic acumen or creative freedom from the studio (I am guessing), to make a ho-hum heist picture about Loyalty with a capital "L" be any more than it seems on paper. It does have to be said, however, that he has more than proven himself to be an effective director, especially when it comes to atmosphere and character. Not bad from the star of Armageddon.

The Social Network

Calling the director of the latest "it" movie the next Stanley Kubrick has become par for the course. Unlike other Mount Rushmore filmmakers like Hitchcock, Kurosawa and Fellini, it is not easy to find traces of Kubrick even in the most highbrow Hollywood output. Perhaps this is because the director of Spartacus, 2001, The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut did not follow a particular pattern. His calculating gaze always shifted to a new genre, a different historical period, a new world to conquer almost at random. The same can now be said of David Fincher, whose last four films have trapped Jodie Foster in a 4x6 steel box, documented an unresolved, 20-year police procedural, told the magically realistic epic of a man who ages backwards, and gone to college with the youngest self-made billionaire of all time.

One night, a sexually frustrated nerd named Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) got drunk and created a rudimentary social networking site called Facemash. Maybe he was hoping to get back at his ex girlfriend, or just get her back; maybe he was trying to climb the social ladder at Harvard, to join one of the exclusive final clubs. He ended up accomplishing neither - however, with the prodding of the preppy Winkelvoss twins (Armie Hammer) and the financial backing of his best friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), within a semester Zuckerberg had launched Facebook, and thus digitized "the entire social experience of college." He still did not have a girlfriend.

I cannot have been the only one relishing the idea of a "Facebook movie", especially in the hands of David Fincher. I played over and over again in my mind the scene in Fight Club, where Edward Norton visualizes the price tags for each item of Danish furniture and houseware, complete with product description and other available colors. Yet, despite the limitless voyeuristic possibilities and the highly misleading trailer, The Social Network avoids screen after screen of unwanted information. For a film referenced for the past 18 months as "the Facebook movie", the film is surprisingly character driven.

That is because, like the film's subject, Fincher has a rather important collaborator. Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the sharp, memorable dialogue in films like The American President and A Few Good Men and the TV shows SportsNight and The West Wing has finally leant his wit to some younger, less pretentious characters. Armed with this perfect script, Fincher is freed to create the meticulous performances that pepper even his lesser films. Garfield and Eisenberg both take up nervous, wavering dialects, two upper middle class nobodies suddenly at the forefront of a revolution. And the film is positively stolen by Justin Timberlake, who plays Sean Parker, founder of Napster and soon Zuckerberg's mentor in the world of dotcom startups.

Though Facebook may seem an impossibly trendy and fleeting cultural phenomenon, The Social Network will surely live on long after we can have all this information zapped straight to our brain chips. It's ultimately a film about friendships, class and, most importantly, genius. Not unlike Charles Foster Kane, Zuckerberg wants to be loved on his own terms, and not unlike Charles Foster Kane, this leads to heartbreak, alienation, and litigation. The Winkelvoss twins have had everything handed to them, and Saverin has earned what little he has through business acumen, not pure talent. Though the audience has to admire Zuckerberg, in the way we admire a Mozart, we cannot necessarily empathize. His automaton programming hypnosis, and his positively repulsive interactions with women make him a little like Moses; he has lead the rest of us to the promised land, but he cannot enter.

The film begins and ends with a female assessment of Zuckerberg - one thinks he is an asshole, the other thinks he is just pretending to be. Whether he is or not, there is no question that the idea of Mark Zuckerberg, the one propogated by Facebook, is certainly a more powerful and imposing entity than the real-life poindexter. The Social Network is smart because it does not treat Zuckerberg as some unstoppable and insatiable genius, the way portraits of Bill Gates have done in the past. In many ways, Fincher's films is a satire of meritocracy, where a dishonorably, sniveling slob with rises to the top, hiding behind lines and lines of html. He is safe there, can be whoever he wants to be, and pay off anyone who says different. He invites us to do the same.