jürgen fauth’s muckworld

Hard-working German actor Jürgen Vogel plays the serial rapist Theo in Matthias Glasner’s almost unbearably grim The Free Will (Der Freie Wille). When we meet Theo, he’s heavy-set and angry, working at the cafeteria of a seaside youth hostel. Within minutes of the film’s beginning, he spots a potential victim, knocks her off a bicycle and drags her into the dunes, where he ties her up, rips off her clothes, beats and rapes her in a brutal sequence that seems designed to weed out those audience members who won’t have the stomach for what’s to come.

When we see Theo again, nine years later, he seems profoundly changed: with a buff body but a docile and contrite manner, he tells his parole board just what they need to hear to release him. Told in handheld scenes with an authentic, documentary feel, Der Freie Wille unflinchingly observes Theo’s struggle to contain his own aggressive desires and insecurities.

Glasner’s script manages to steer clear of any move that could be construed as making excuses for Theo as we follow the tortured paths he takes through the provincial German town, including harrowing scenes in which he follows random women through subway tunnels and darkened streets. Der Freie Wille takes a surprising turn when we’re introduced to Nettie (the striking Sabine Timoteo), a young woman who is just leaving behind her overbearing father.

The brittle love that blossoms between Theo and Nettie is the film’s thorniest conceit. We’re trained to wish happiness on all screen couples, but the heavily fraught intimacy we become a party to here is exceedingly difficult to watch. In fact, without the eye-opening performances by Vogel and Timoteo, the film is impossible to imagine: they don’t seem to be afraid to lay bare their very souls.

Glasner softens the blows with moments of fragile joy, but this is not a film that harbors any illusions that love will conquer all. No doubt, Der Freie Wille goes places where not everybody will want to follow, but it stays emotionally true to its frightful subject and finds moments of startling honesty at the extremes of what audiences can endure.

Benten Films will release The Free Will on DVD in the U.S. later this year.

Der Freie Wille. Matthias Glasner, 2006. ****

• Review in Der Spiegel
• The trailer:

“You’ve got a serious artist crush,” Marcy remarked — a statement, not a question — when I sent her a link to a gallery of adorably geeky photographs of Paul Thomas Anderson during the Hard Eight period. Guilty as charged: I’ve been rewatching and reassessing and obsessing over all five of PTA’s films, reevaluating Punch-Drunk Love (which I originally hated), rediscovering the ending of Boogie Nights (much different from what I remembered), and unable to resist the pull of Magnolia even on a matchbox-sized iPod screen.

Sez Dennis Lim:

If the Altman comparisons seem grossly reductive, it’s because Anderson is liberal when it comes to borrowing from the greats. Why not combine Altman’s panoramic outlook with Stanley Kubrick’s formal bravura with John Cassavetes’ messy candor? While Anderson fits the profile of a “hysterical realist,” to evoke the pejorative literary buzz-phrase of a few years ago, his films never indulge in excess for the sake of excess. He’s a born showman—his first three films bore the Barnumesque credit “A P.T. Anderson picture”—but his go-for-broke tendencies are tied to an expansive, humanist impulse.

Lim’s entire appreciation of Anderson is spot-on, and before I swipe his video clips, I’d just like to expand on his last point: seems to me, the unifying theme underlying all of Anderson’s films is the desperate need for human connection. Yes, that’s a cloying phrase, and perhaps that’s why it’s dressed up in such unlikely garb: the incendiary monologues, the sweeping steadycams, the assaultive music, the undulating colors. What all of Anderson’s characters really need is a family, but their real families rarely work: in Hard Eight, Jack’s father is dead, Dirk Diggler’s mom throws him out, everybody in Magnolia is messed up six different ways, Barry Egan’s seven sisters are worse than the furies, and we all know that Daniel Plainview’s an oilman, not a family man.

Instead, Anderson’s heroes create impromptu families. Jack finds a father figure in his father’s killer, porn gives Diggler not just a dad (Burt Reynolds) but a sister (Heather Graham) and a mother (Julianne Moore), too. In Punch-Drunk Love, Adam Sandler and Emily Watson start their own family, and Magnolia ends in an orgy of characters coming home to each other. And Plainview? His salvation would have been an impromptu family with a bastard from a basket for a son and a brother who wasn’t his brother-from-another-mother. That he refused them is the tragedy of There Will Be Blood.

Can’t leave you without another word about Anderson’s breathtaking audacity, and you better believe I’m lazy enough to quote Lim again:

The prominent bursts of music—and the way the narratives rely on musical principles like rhythm, tone, and phrasing—result in a kind of delirious synesthesia. His movies set off a crazy multitude of sensory triggers, leaving the impression that Anderson is working from a larger palette than most filmmakers.

Yes indeed.

Hard Eight/Sydney. Paul Thomas Anderson, 1996. ***
Boogie Nights. Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997. ****
Magnolia. Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999. ****
Punch-Drunk Love. Paul Thomas Anderson. 2002. ****
There Will Be Blood. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007. *****

More from Stu VanAirsdale, who kept notes on his marathon Anderson retrospective. After the jump, videos with choice clips from Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch-Drunk Love.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ecstatic worshipers in store-front churches, steel workers in their homes, the down-and-out inhabitants of Buffalo’s skid row: social documentary photographer Milton Rogovin was never interested in the well-to-do. Thus, the quote that serves as the title of Ezra Bookstein’s sharp and fully realized portrait of Rogovin, now 98 years old.

In the fifties, Rogovin was working as an optometrist when he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He refused to give any answers and was promptly named “the top red in Buffalo.” Silenced in the political arena, Rogovin turned to photography as an expressive outlet. His photos of poor Black church services were published in Aperture Magazine with an introduction by W.E.B. DuBois. For the next nine years, Rogovin and his wife Anne spent their summers in Appalachia to take portraits of miners. He went on to collaborate with Pablo Neruda on a book of photos from Chile and produce an ongoing series of portraits from Buffalo’s Lower West Side at ten-year-intervals.

Rogovin’s photos are a revelation: startlingly honest, they are as beautiful as they are unnerving. The unglamorous subjects are not usually the center of our attention, yet we can somehow see their personality before we see their dire surroundings. These are pictures that spark talk of inequality and human dignity. As James Wood of the Art Institute of Chicago explains in the film, the photos’ undeniable artistic accomplishment is a way of making a more effective case: the beauty comes bearing a message, and for Rogovin, art is only ever a means to an end.

• Official Site of the Film
• The Trailer
• Milton Rogovin’s Web Site
• Milton Rogovin at Wikipedia

The Rich Have Their Own Photographers. Ezra Bookstein, 2007. ****

Poodle-in-law Bo needed my loving attention and finely honed dog-walking skills last week, so I only saw three new films along with the never-ending (and frequently repeating) slew of half-watched classics that drifted by on suburban cable TV. Expect this ratio to shift dramatically when I hit the Berlinale next week.

In Bruges. Martin McDonagh, 2008. Review forthcoming. They sent us In Bruges hats, so you know it’ll be a rave! Updated: My About.com review. ****

The Witnesses/Les Témoins. André Téchiné, 2007. Marcy reviewed. ***

London to Brighton. Paul Andrew Williams, 2006. Especially after the grace and humanity of 4 Months, I found this sordid tale of abused women difficult to stomach. *

Also:
The Empire Strikes Back. Irvin Kershner, 1980. *****
One, Two, Three. Billy Wilder, 1961. *****
The Dreamers. Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003. Marcy’s review. ****
Quadrophenia. Franc Roddam, 1979 ****
The Big Lebowski. Joel and Ethan Coen, 1998. *****
The Birds. Alfred Hitchcock, 1963. ****

Musical Bonus: As featured in The Witnesses, here’s Les Rita Mitsuko.

So this is why they invented the phrase “va-va-voom!” The second most pleasant surprise about this film is the ending, which eschews the usual moralizing. Take note, Smiley Face: just because you have a female main character who behaves comme un animal sauvage (sexually or herbally) doesn’t mean you have to make her pay for it. Guess that’s what makes And God Created Woman such a libertine landmark. But why don’t we leave the analysis to Chuck Stephens and ogle Bardot in the trailer instead? This movie would make a fine double-feature with Le Gendarme de St. Tropez.

Et Dieu…créa la femme. Roger Vadim, 1956. ****

• And God Created Woman at Wikipedia
• Brigitte Bardot at Wikipedia

Since I’m behind the curve on most items in this Konsum roundup, the soundtrack for today’s post is provided by Talking Heads, performing “The Great Curve” in Rome in 1980. You can download a DVD of the entire show from Dimeadozen.

4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days
As apparently the last critic in New York City to see the freshly Academy-snubbed 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, I don’t have much to add to the universal acclaim the film has garnered — only this: if you take a look at the Rotten Tomatoes page, you’ll see adjectives like “excruciating,” “harrowing,” “wearing,” “wrenching,” “bleak,” and “unblinking.” All of those fit, but it seems to me the terminology applied to blockbusters like The Bourne Ultimatum isn’t inappropriate, either: 4 Months is also an edge-of-your seat thriller.
4 luni, 3 saptamani si 2 zile. Cristian Mungiu, 2007. ****

Woman on the Beach
My favorite at NYFF06 — at least until INLAND EMPIRE showed up — is currently playing at Film Forum. Reason enough to take another look. Lo and behold, it’s still a wonderful film. J. Hoberman.
Haebyonui yoin. Hong Sang-soo, 2006. ****

The Duchess of Langeais
An About.com review of Rivette’s Balzac adaptation starring Jeanne Balibar and Guillaume Depardieu is forthcoming.
Ne touchez pas la hache. Jacques Rivette, 2007. ****

The Wire, Season 1
Yes, we’re ridiculously far behind, so I can barely participate in the conversation at this point. Anybody who’s been following this blog knows that I’m a sucker for structure, and The Wire’s intricate plot lines left my head spinning. Looking forward to catching up with the remaining four seasons, like, this weekend. ****

30 Rock
I love every single character on Tina Fey’s show, from Alec Baldwin’s head of TV and microwave programming to nutso Tracy Morgan and Kenneth the Page, and I haven’t seen a TV show that delivers as many smart laughs per minute since the first season of Arrested Development. 30 Rock makes me happy. ****

Californication
Thoroughly enjoyable HBO series about a sex-and-booze addicted writer (David Duchovny) who is still in love with his ex-wife (Natascha McElhone), and whose novel God Hates Us All was adapted into the “Tom and Katie” vehicle Crazy Little Thing Called Love. ***

You may have heard French lounge cover act Nouvelle Vague’s version of Eisbär, but nothing beats the original 1981 Grauzone version of the song, a Neue Deutsche Welle hit in 1981. At least that’s what I thought until I saw Valeska Grisebach’s Sehnsucht (Longing), in which a German small-town couple plays it on their dinky keyboard after dinner. In their incapable hands, the song’s NDW ironic reserve (this is the period that brought us Trio’s “Da Da Da“) turns into real heartache that perfectly encapsulates the movie’s mood of awkward tragedy.

Like Christian Petzold and Robert Thalheim, Valeska Grisebach gets lumped into the Neue Berliner Schule — and I guess I just did it, too. Movement or not, every film by these directors that I’ve managed to catch so far has been outstanding. Sehnsucht, the story of an ill-fated love affair between a locksmith and a waitress cast with non-professional actors and set in a tiny village, feels absolutely lifelike. The characters and the tired, cliche-ridden things they say in hopeless attempts of bridging the gaps between them are depressingly real and instantly familiar to anybody who has spent any time in small-town Germany. Bold direction and editing add an artful dimension to the sparse, elegant story. There’s a fantastic sequence involving a Robbie Williams song, and then there’s that Eisbär.

• signandsight
• Sehnsucht - Laien werden Berlinale-Stars
• “Sehnsucht”: Realismus des Wünschens
• Arne Hoehne Presse | Sehnsucht
• Sehnsucht (Schnitt Online)

Sehnsucht. Valeska Grisebach, 2006. ****

This post is dedicated to the polar bear at the Central Park Zoo, who swims laps tirelessly to everybody’s endless delight. Too bad about that whole warming thing.

Occasioned by There Will Be Blood, this revisit was slightly disappointing. My childhood memories of this film were absolutely devastating — I’d probably never seen a tragic anti-hero before — but some of the changes the characters go through feel forced by contemporary standards. Walter Huston’s Oscar-winning turn as leathery gold digger is very amusing and certainly informs Plainview.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. John Huston, 1948. ****

• Stinkin’ Badges
• Roger Ebert
• The Treasure of the Sierra Madre on Wikipedia