With all its tediousness of an over-evocative montage and a story
line that presents some highly improbable scenarios Perfect Sense turns out to be a fairly enjoyable film. Poetic in a
way, but too serious about its subject matter, the film equally charms and annoys
with its emotive stylistic features and a poorly written script.
The film tells a story of a young couple, Michael (Ewan
McGregor) and Susan (Eva Green) who must overcome their emotional fears while
struggling to make sense of the outburst of an unusual epidemic during which
people start losing their senses. The disease first attacks the sense of smell,
and then moves to taste, sound and finally sight. People try to keep on living
while their worlds slowly turn upside down. In the foreground to that
apocalyptic occurrence, the director David McKenzie plots a love fairytale
about two people who overcome all obstacles and learn to understand the true meaning
of love. The story sounds banal, but as it may surprise some, that banality is
the film’s biggest forte.
When taken seriously Perfect
Sense is an incredibly depressing love story. The whole world is heading
towards its end; humanity will quite probably cease to exist after the last
sense – sight, finally disappears. But only through such magnificent decline of
our civilisation we are to understand the true meaning of the titled ‘perfect
sense’. All other senses must fail us so that we can appreciate the most
important one of them all – the sensation of love.
I wish I could give some smart explanation to McKenzie’s
extravagant message, but I can’t. I’m afraid that if I start analysing his film
too closely I will start liking it less and less with each question asked. Why
is it that such profound suffering must be brought upon people only so that they
can appreciate the meaning of love? Why is love to be thought as the ‘perfect
sense’? Why does the director sympathise so strongly with the society’s embrace
of suffering? Why isn’t anyone trying to find a cure to the ‘epidemic’?
But then, why bother asking? Finding answers to any of
these questions won’t make the film any better. So the point of the story is
this: ignorance is bliss. Happy Valentine’s Day!
There
is no way of watching a major film festival winner like Andrei Sokurov’s Faust without having to overcome a set
of expectations that being such a highly praised flick would entail. To explain
in detail what having these expectations means I would like to spend a moment
to examine the circumstances of Faust
becoming the winner of last year’s edition of the Venice Film Festival.
Viennale’s rickety track record of selecting its winners is a prime example of
how the politics of a film festival and the judges’ bias towards certain
artists has a power to poison its supposedly fair selection process. The most
recent edition that brought a lot of negative publicity was the 2010 festival
when Quentin Tarantino famously showered his ex-girlfriend Sofia Coppola and
her Somewhere with the most important
statuettes. Tarantino’s misjudgement prompted the festival’s organisers to
introduce more scrutiny into selection process, which would disable the jury
from pulling a similar audacious stunt in the future.
The
controversy surrounding the 2010 edition inevitably affected the politics of
awarding the films a year later. Even without watching the film one can
definitely notice how Faust seems to
be a very reasonably safe choice. Aleksander Sokurov is quite a renowned artist
whose filmography spans almost 20 feature films, many of which were awarded at
a multitude of film festivals in the years past. The director’s lack of
affiliation with any of the jurors (Darren Aronofsky chaired the jury that
year) and his indubitable directorial skills assured that there would be no
disagreement in choosing his film as the winner in 2011. Yet the blatancy of it
being such safe, uncontroversial choice diminishes the festival’s status and
victimises Sokurov by making him the festival’s agent of propagating political
correctness. But before we discuss that point a bit further, let’s look at the
film itself.
The
story of Faust loosely follows
Goethe’s 19th century masterpiece of the same title. Doctor Faust
(Johannes Zeiler) is disappointed with life which has brought him nothing but misery.
In the book, the character is a God-fearing individual who cherishes knowledge
above the well-being of his soul. The Faust that we know from Sokurov’s film
already acquired all the knowledge a human can hope to obtain and learned that
there was no happiness to be found in science. Understanding how the world
works made him vulnerable and nihilistic. Faust then accidentally meets a local
moneylender named Mauritius (Anton Adasinsky) who represents the devil from
Goethe’s prose – Mephistopheles. Mauritius stops Faust from committing suicide
and takes him on a journey around the town. In a public laundry Faust notices a
beautiful young girl name Margarete (Isolda Dychauk) who charms him with her
laughter. A chain of events, all of which are masterfully manipulated by
Mauritius, lead the two men to the funeral of Margarete’s estranged brother
where Faust is given a chance to make further advances towards the girl. The
two make an instant connection but in order to fulfil his sexual desires Faust
is forced to sell his soul to the devil.
The
list of differences between Sokurov’s film and Goethe’s novel is too long to
consider the source material anything more than an inspiration. Goethe’s
character was an archetypically romantic, restless soul whose hunger for
knowledge of the world prompts him to resign from eternal bliss. Sokurov’s Faust is a cold
pragmatic who looks at life through the prism of science, believing only in the
certainty of material things. That attitude turns him into a nihilist who
thinks that life is both absurd and unfair, lacking any sense of meaning. He
follows the footsteps of Kafka’s K, who is unable to make any sense of the social
injustice. Just like K, Faust is passively led to his doom, constantly pushed
around by society, unable to avoid his disastrous fate.
Sokurov
obviously has a message to share through his reinvention of Faust. In one of
the scenes Faust visits another doctor who runs a very successful practice in
the town. The secret to his success is his sensibility to applying just the right
kind of treatment so desired by his patients. According to Sokurov, the
intellectual elite are in decline as their insight is undermined by the
outgrowing consumerist market. Faust’s expertise is unwanted and unnecessary as
it goes against the popular concepts. His blind certainty in science pushes him
to the extremes and compels him to deny God or any form of the supernatural.
Sokurov criticises him for that. He surrounds his main character with the
mystique of nature and presents him with the angelic countenance of Margarete,
but the man still cannot see below the surface. In the end his ignorance, as is
the case for so many characters, is his undoing.
Sokurov’s
theme of spirituality vs. science brings us back to the aforementioned point
about the festival’s political correctness. The director’s objection towards a consumerist
society is clichéd to say the least. Even more, the director makes some
astounding assumptions that people’s vain consumerism is the outcome of a
spiritual decline which will lead us to atheism and nihilism. His distrust in
science comes from a conviction that no scientific formula can describe
artistic sensibilities. The jury of the festival stands in full support of
Sokurov’s view, no matter how tiresome and over-prudent the perception of
spiritual superiority over science might be. But what matters for Viennale is
that Sokurov’s film is a poster child for cinema d’auteur. Through the film’s
audacious aesthetics, non-linear storytelling, and artistic inter-textuality
the festival board proves that they are still able to recognise ‘real’ cinema.
And that creates an interesting paradox – Viennale fulfils Sokurov’s prophecy
of artistic decline precisely by awarding his film with the main prize.
As it premiered in the UK during last year’s London Film Festival,
Ceylan’s latest film Once Upon a Time in
Anatolia was rendered as his “most audacious film yet.” When the word “audacity”
is used in relation to the Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan one can be sure
that his audaciousness will be evident in a complete disregard to the audiences’
expectations of the film. We are tested on many levels with Anatolia. Not only the film’s duration
reaches the unexpected 2 ½ hours, its narration seems monotonous at best and
the subject of the film potentially unworthy of our investment. And yet it must
be said that Ceylan’s uncompromising audaciousness pays off in the end and all
of the aforementioned concerns transpire that one’s pre-established conception
of a film structure can be damaging to our cinematic experience to say the
least. The director takes us on a journey into the wilderness of the Turkish
southern parts where we experience mysticism emanating from the region’s
rich cultural entanglements.
It is said that Anatolia
entices mainly through its surreal dimension. Although its dreamlike quality is
definitely noticeable, the film’s artistry is best to be seen through the prism of
magical realism. Ceylan’s story while interweaved with a multitude of
aesthetical and artistic elements is not meant to be read on purely allegorical
level. The amount of detail each character brings into the story requires our
attention and full investment into their lives. Through their tales – The Prosecutor’s
wife’s death, the Commissioner’s family sickness or the Mayor’s concerns
regarding his community, we learn the story of the region. We see the moral
struggle of each character through the eyes of the Doctor who silently observes
the events of the night and shares his thoughts whenever his guidance is
needed. His persona is just as enigmatic as the natural beauty of the region,
but just as mysterious and dangerous. He appears to be wholesome and sensible
at first, but with the last few minutes of the film our certainty about the
Doctor’s characteristics is turned upside down. To call him unethical would be
both over-exaggeration and understatement; he fails to maintain his integrity
as a fellow human being, but Ceylan uses his moral ambiguity to represent the
character of Anatolia. As such the Doctor remains mysterious and complex.
Once Upon a Time in
Anatolia isn’t necessarily my favourite film of Ceylan, but here more than
in any other of his movies, his bold stylistic approach elevates us to a
completely new level of the directorial “audaciousness.” His complete disinterest
in providing entertainment is both refreshing and venerable. For the first time
Ceylan avoids any kind of visual trickery. Instead he composes his film by
assembling long, steady shots intertwined with close-ups of characters’ faces
and shots of the nature. The journey into the uninhabited parts of Anatolia is
a journey back in time. We end up in the fields, with the wind gushing through
the tree branches; we come across a small village where the monotonous
existence needs to overcome electricity shortages and lack of resources. The
film is a mosaic of the beautiful landscapes of Anatolia and the people whose
lives are bound with the region’s history. Ceylan’s Turkey thrills and
fascinates. And so do his films.
Jacky Vanmarsenille has his testicles smashed as a young boy
by one of his peers and is subjected to a series of hormonal injections for the
rest of his life. Talking about a crisis of masculinity! Jacky’s concept of maleness
is from this moment forth reshaped and associated purely with appearances; his
need to fill the gap left by the destroyed gland urges him to experiment with new
types of hormonal injections to make him appear closer to what he imagines to
be a genuine man. Yet the outcome of his experiments is overblown, grotesque.
The substance he takes in makes him more aggressive, agitated and emotionally unstable.
Jacky compares himself with the cattle that he breeds on his farm which
similarly to him is given illegal drugs to boost their mass. He calls himself a
beast.
Bullhead is a gangster film which takes a very atypical approach
to the usual model of the genre. It revisits the masculine drive for power and
re-evaluates the meaning of a macho figure in contemporary West. The Fleming-Belgian
setting makes the issue of masculine projections even more vivid. The mutual repugnance
of each region is driven by the centuries-long history of violence and political
rebellion and continues to heat the relations between the Francophone and
Flemish Belgians to this day.
Jacky is caught in the middle of this ongoing conflict, both
as a victim and a perpetrator of the wrongdoings. Betrayed by his closest
friend when still a child, he is attacked and mutilated by the local Mafioso’s son,
and ostracised by the local society. There is a very Shakespearian dimension to
Jacky’s tragedy. His fate is determined by the surrounding social disadvantages
and Jacky is unable to divert his steps from the path that leads him directly
to his own doom. Just like with the bulls who are destined for the slaughter,
death is the only possible way out for him.
Why was Bullhead nominated
for an Oscar is a bit of a mystery – although it is a decent film, it doesn’t
represent anything particularly exceptional. My theory is that the Academy has
a thing for all kinds of tragic morality tales and so every year it picks a
film that falls into that category... Similarly to last year’s Incendies, or The Prophet from two years ago, Bullhead
tries to enquire about the “circle of violence” and its wider, social implications.
It is both entertaining and thought-provoking but aesthetically conventional at
the same time. I wish more risks were taken in the narrative department, but
then that would probably lose the film’s chance for a nomination.
