jürgen fauth’s muckworld

In this Czech New Wave film, the medieval warrior-monks who break the oath to their crusading order are thrown to the dogs: literally, down a deep well, to starving hounds who rip them to shreds. And yet, Ondrej wants to leave–after all, he joined only because his father threw him against the wall after he brought his new stepmother a wedding present of spring blossoms concealing a heap of dead bats. In other words, just another day in Bohemia.

When Ondrej runs off, his friend Armin, much more serious about the monk’s strict demands, is sent to chase after him and deliver swift punishment. The themes are grand — sin, murder, forgiveness — but the drama isn’t what makes The Valley of the Bees. The film’s sharp, rigorous style develops its own pull; it’s every bit as ascetic as the monks themselves.

Udoli vcel. Frantisek Vlácil, 1967. ***

• Michael Atkinson in the Village Voice
• Flickhead
• Facets Multimedia
• Daisies
• Knife in the Water

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

Read the rest of this entry »

Monk double feature! At first glance, The Name of the Rose and Into Great Silence couldn’t be any more different — one is a plotless meditation on stillness and solitude, the other an overstuffed megaproduction that bursts at the seams with narrative twists and gleeful cliches. One movie is about the absence of language, the other one revels in linguistic jokes and a cornucopia of literary allusions high and low. But by approaching their common subject from very different points of view, the two films illuminate (ha!) each other.

All things considered, Jean-Jacques Annaud’s adaptation of Umberto Eco’s bestseller has held up well. Eco’s intellectual games are filtered through Annaud’s lurid lens, by the way of German producer Bernd Eichinger’s taste for the blockbuster: Eco dressed up semiotic theories with the trimmings of popular entertainment, and in Annaud/Eichinger’s hands, the erudition falls by the wayside in favor of freakish brothers (witness Ron Perlman ham it up as hunchback heretic) and forbidden sex.

It speaks for Eco’s talents as storyteller that even when you rid his book of the lengthy debates about medieval scholarship, it’s still a rip roaring good story, overloaded with literary references (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jorge Luis Borges are the most obvious ones), men who speak “all languages and no language” for him to better hide his polylingual puns, and a tightly plotted story that hinges on all the tropes of monkhood: secret libraries, blind fathers, flagellation, mad heretics, ancient secrets, repressed homosexuality, evil inquisitors, damsels burning at the stake. The Name of the Rose is bursting with signifiers, pointing everywhere at once, while Into Great Silence makes a strong effort not to point anywhere at all, to just be here now. Both movies are using the monastic life for their own ulterior motives; I’d argue that this one does it somewhat more successfully. (The interiors of The Name of the Rose were shot at Kloster Eberbach, a few minutes from where I grew up.)

Der Name der Rose. Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1986. ****

• Wikipedia: Middle Ages in Film

Philip Gröning lived in a monk’s cell in the French Alps for six months to make this — you guessed it — very quiet documentary about the hermits’ lives. According to the press notes, the Carthusians are among the world’s most ascetic orders. (They also make the sticky herb liqueur Chartreuse). But you wouldn’t know this from the movie, which barely contains a spoken word at all. There is chanting, there is praying, there are the monks’ daily chores, the chopping of wood, the mending of shoes, the preparation of food. The seasons pass: snow falls, ice melts, spring comes, and the fog lifts off the monastery that lies nestled between stunning peaks. The patient observation lasts for nearly three hours; Gröning’s aim is not to explain and analyze the monks, but to approximate their heightened awareness through contemplative filmmaking.

I’m of two minds about this. Into Great Silence is an exquisitely boring, poetic film that uses the carefully observed day-to-day textures of the monk’s austere existence to lull its audience into a meditative state. But there is something of the imitative fallacy to Gröning’s approach. The outward signs of the monk’s lives are just that — they don’t just wander the hallways and kneel: they read, write, think, and pray. Even if they never open their mouths, their heads are filled with words, words we are not privy to. No matter how long he holds his shots, Gröning can only ever show us the surface, never the insides, of what the monks are living for. The film aims to find some sort of vague “spirituality” in moments of mindfulness, but the Carthusian’s very specific religiosity eludes it.

More soon in a full-length review for About.com. Into Great Silence opens next week at Film Forum. Here’s the trailer and the official site.

Die Große Stille. Philip Gröning, 2005. ***