L’Avventura
September 8th, 2007
Granted, I came to this movie from a radically different angle from the crowd who first saw and booed it at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960, but in retrospect, it takes some effort to understand their confusion and upset. Yes, L’Avventura isn’t The Bourne Ultimatum, pacing and plotting are leisurely and oblique, but the film isn’t anywhere near as forbidding as contemporary audiences seemed to think or Camille Paglia recently suggested.
Far from being non-narrative or dull, L’Avventura is loaded with tension. The black and white cinematography is gorgeous and deliberate, and even on the surface, the mystery of Anna (Lea Massari), who disappears on a cruise to a volcanic island, is intriguing. The questionable relationship that develops between Anna’s caddish fiancé Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) and her best friend Claudia (Monica Vitti) is ripe with complex undercurrents of desire, guilt, and despair. And if that’s not enough, you can ponder Antonioni’s masterful play with audience expectations, moral judgments, and narrative/cinematic conventions. If Paglia remembers L’Avventura as “plotless,” what does she make of Apichatpong Weerasethakul or Inland Empire?
L’avventura. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960. *****
Syndromes and a Century
March 20th, 2007
The films of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul occupy a fertile space between narrative and art object, where simple interactions accumulate and gain weight in a web of meaning that is held together as much by space and mood as it is by character and story. Like Tropical Malady, his new film consists of two parts, both involving a love story between doctors. The press notes explain that what can just barely called the plot is loosely based on the memories of Weerasethakul’s parents.
Both halves of the film are set in hospitals, one in the past and the other in the present, and Syndromes and a Century is probably the strangest hospital drama since Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom: Buddhist monks come to tell their nightmares and finagle pills for their entire temple, dentists sing cowboy songs, and boozing chakra healers hide their liqour in prosthetic legs. One doctor tells a lengthy tale about wild orchids, another supposes that DDT stands for “Destroy Dirty Things.” Presents are exchanged, reincarnation is discussed, hearts are — perhaps — broken.
Among recent films, the surrealist pull of Syndromes and a Century doesn’t resemble anything as much as David Lynch’s Inland Empire, bathed in sunlight and freed from violent threats. Both films have a fragmented, time-bending structure in which themes and motifs return and form strange connections. Both directors are fond of dreamlike sequences in which the camera prowls hallways to a brooding score, and both culminate in bizarre, catchy musical numbers. But here the similarities end. While Lynch dregs shocking epiphanies from the gunk of the subconscious, Weerasethakul’s mysteries lie right on the surface, in the obvious, seemingly trivial moments that are riddle and answer at once. Opens in April.
Sang sattawat. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006. ****
- Rotten Tomatoes
- At the 2006 New York Film Festival
- Official Site
- More Inland Empire, Links
- After the jump, the trailer
