The Dreamy Artisan Cinema of Lake Tahoe

LAKE TAHOE 

(Fernando Eimbcke, Mexico, 2008, 81 minutes)

"The director calls his style 'artisan cinema'; I just call it dreamy."-- Jeanette Catsoulis, The New York Times

 

It's a sunny day in the Yucatán as Fernando Eimbcke's film begins. A red Nissan whizzes by and then, after the screen fades to black, the sound of a crash rings out, after which the picture returns. For reasons unexplained, the teenaged driver has smashed the family car into a telegraph pole. Apparently unharmed, he sets out to seek help for the ailing automobile. 

As in Eimbcke's 2004 feature debut, Duck Season, cinematographer Alexis Zabé uses long, static shots to capture this prologue. Moments later, while Juan (Diego Cataño) waits for suspicious old coot Don Heber (Héctor Herrera) to assist him, Zabé shoots their figures from Yasujirō's Ozu's "tatami mat" level, rendering Heber's vertical figure headless. 

Once convinced Juan isn't trying to rob him, Heber slurps down a bowl of cereal, recommends a distributor harness, and then promptly falls asleep in his backyard hammock, leaving Juan to continue combing the empty streets for assistance. Finally he meets David (Juan Carlos Lara), a martial arts-obsessed mechanic who gives him a ride to the sedan on his bicycle. David offers to repair the damage for 300 pesos (approximately $25 USD), which Juan doesn't have, so the quest for help turns into a quest for money. 

As it turns out, the money is the easy part. Juan borrows the sum from a friend, but help continues to allude him and he can't reach his mother by telephone. The pastel port town of Progreso looks real, but ascribes to a sort of dream logic. Passive if persistent, Juan watches a video with David, then shares a meal with him and his evangelical mother. 

Eimbcke, who wrote the semi-autobiographical screenplay with Paula Markovitch, cowriter of Duck Season and writer/director of The Prize, suggests that Juan needs the companionship of these lonely people as much as they need him. The difference is, they seem to know it, and he doesn't. 

Juan walks home, but his mother and younger brother are in no mood to talk, so he returns to town to pick up the missing part. Next thing he knows, he's watching Enter the Dragon with David, hanging out with Lucía (Daniela Valentine), the punk-rock singer and single mother who works with him at the auto parts store, and walking—then losing—Don Heber's beloved boxer. 

A skinny, sad-faced kid whose clothes hang from his frame, Juan knows how to say no, but not very forcefully. The reason for his demeanor gradually comes into relief, but Eimbcke drops some broad hints along the way. 

If the film works, and it does, it would work even better if those hints had been more subtle or had arrived closer to the end, but the way the filmmaker infuses a laconic comedy with loss and longing links Lake Tahoe with Duck Season, and serves as a nominal sequel since he cast the same leading man, and despite the move from B&W to color, urban to rural, interior to exterior. 

On the basis of his first film, among the best of 2006, I wouldn't have predicted that Eimbcke might one day recall Carlos Reygadas, except the distance between Lake Tahoe and Silent Light--Zabé also shot the Reygadas film--is surprisingly short, while a greater gap lies between him and the more genre-oriented Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuarón, and Alejandro González Iñárritu, though he thanks the latter two in the credits. 

At this point in their careers, Eimbcke and Reygadas have the art house in their sights, but while it's hard to imagine Reygadas transitioning to American-style filmmaking, Eimbcke's interest in restless teenagers—notwithstanding Cuarón's Y Tu Mamá También—predicts a career more like Kelly Reichardt or Gus Van Sant than other Mexican filmmakers. 

If Lake Tahoe isn't as funny as Duck Season, a low-income twist on Risky Business in which a bored teen makes the most of an unsupervised Sunday, it's a richer work. Though Eimbcke relies too much on Jim Jarmusch's fade-to-black device and though the sleepy pace has its longeurs, even at 81 minutes, he aptly reproduces the rhythms of small-town life where the seemingly minor episodes between major events and the seemingly random strangers who enter your life can attain mythic dimensions when the familiar can't—at least temporarily—offer the necessary support. 

Lake Tahoe continues at the Northwest Film Forum through July 30 at 7 and 9pm. The NWFF is located at 1515 12th Ave between Pike and Pine on Capitol Hill. For more information, please click here. Images from Harvard Film Archive (Daniela Valentine) and Rotten Tomatoes (Diego Cataño and Juan Carlos Lara and Cataño with Héctor Herrera's on-screen pooch).

The Little Film That Did: An Interview with Humpday Writer/Director/Actor Lynn Shelton

Last June, Steve Clare (Prost Amerika, Seattle Fine Arts Examiner) and I took Lynn Shelton up on her offer to visit the set of Humpday. 

Afterward, I filed a digressive dispatch about our field trip, while he interviewed the director via email prior to the Centerpiece Gala premiere at this year's Seattle International Film Festival. At the time I wrote, "I have no idea whether this micro-budget film will actually 'work' or not. Based on the quality of Shelton's previous efforts, though, I have faith. The scenes were intriguing, and since she's working with a more experienced cast, the movie might even attract more attention than We Go Way Back and My Effortless Brilliance despite—or even because of—the fact that she made it on a smaller scale." 

Since completion, Humpday has attracted far more attention than I could have ever possibly predicted. Shelton has traveled with "the little film that could" to Sundance, SXSW, Cannes, and Edinburgh and has appeared in a number of high-profile publications, including The New York Times. It's rare for a local film to receive this kind of exposure. It's also incredibly exciting and extremely well deserved. Since Clare used a few of my questions, I secured his permission to reproduce his Q&A here. Humpday opens in Seattle and New York this Friday. 

Clare: In as many or as few words as it needs, how does a Seattle filmmaker become a success?

Shelton: By making regular sacrifices to the aztec fertility goddess CIHUACOATYL. 

Clare: Do you intend to stay in Seattle and continue to make film here? 

Shelton: Yes, I do. 

Clare: Was there a pivotal moment when it dawned on you Humpday was going to be big? 

Shelton: When Mark Duplass said he'd do it, I had a hunch. Signing Joshua Leonard on added to my hopes. And when Alycia Delmore said yes, I pretty much knew I had a blockbuster on my hands. 

Clare: What have you learned about male bonding since My Effortless Brilliance? Do you like us more, the more you find out? 

Shelton: You become even more adorable with every movie I make. 

Clare: In an unashamed moment of unadulterated "luvviness," pay tribute to your co-stars. 

Shelton: Yes, my actors are talented. Incredibly talented. But what impressed me even more was the high level of commitment they brought to the set. The only possible way a film like this could have ever worked was with that kind of engagement on the part of the entire cast, and those guys brought it, they really did. 

Clare: Mark [and Jay] Duplass made Baghead and you've made Humpday. Is there something to be said for one-word film titles? 

Shelton: Only when you combine two words to make one. There is something to be said for that.

Clare: What's next for Lynn Shelton? 

Shelton: I plan on making more films. 

Clare: Do you have any interest in making a film about women? 

Shelton: No. Girls are boring. Just kidding! I'm very excited to work with the female race some day.

[We Go Way Back, her feature-film debut, focuses on a female character.] 

Fennessy: How much of the dialogue was improvised? 

Shelton: 110% 

Fennessy: What do your parents think about it? 

Shelton: My dad and stepmom saw it at Sundance and loved it. My mom and stepdad will see it at SIFF; I have high hopes that they won't disown me but you never know. 

Fennessy: Have you ever been to Hump? 

Shelton: No; it always sells out before I can get a ticket! 

[Slightly revised from the original text.]

Related reading: Click here for my 2006 interview with Shelton and here for the 2008 interview Clare and I conducted with Mark and Jay Duplass. 

Endnote: Humpday opens in Seattle on July 10 at the Harvard Exit and in New York at the Angelika Film Center. According to Shelton, the film "will roll out to other cities in the weeks following (for a complete list, please refer to the Humpday website)." Images from Rotten Tomatoes and indieWIRE.

Everything Dies: Godard's Made in U.S.A., Part Two

MADE IN U.S.A.
(Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1966, 90 mins.)


Click here for part one


In Made in U.S.A., the plot isn't the point, though the film does have one, loosely borrowed from Richard Stark's novel The Jugger* and Howard Hawks' noir The Big Sleep. In Godard's post-modern policier, newly-retired reporter Paula Nelson (Godard's ex-wife, Anna Karina) sets out to determine what happened to her lover, Richard. When he turns up dead, she tries to figure out who killed him. Or so she says.

Since Karina is such a sympathetic presence and since the proceedings play out from Paula's perspective, it's easy to side with her trenchcoat-clad femme fatale even as she murders several men, putting her proclaimed innocence in serious doubt.

Just as the location is an abstraction, death also plays for laughs until Paula's final homicide, which brings her to tears. When she shoots Donald Siegel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), however, he dies in such a comical fashion, it's hard to suppress a smile.

Aside from Siegel, a reference to the Baby Face Nelson auteur, Godard's Atlantic City features Ben Hecht and Preminger Streets and characters named Inspector Aldrich, Miss Daisy Kenyon, Paul (not Richard) Widmark, and David Goodis, author of the novel behind Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player. As is his wont, Godard also works in nods to Italian poetry, German psychology, and Japanese film, as embodied by Doris Mizoguchi (Kyoko Kosaka), who sings a lovely little number in Paula's tub.

Furthermore, Godard and DP Raoul Coutard use the color red here much as in Pierrot le Fou and La Chinoise. It saturates the scene in spectacularly vivid form. When blood flows, it looks more like cherry-flavored cough syrup than actual sanguination.

That said, Made in U.S.A. isn't a comedy, not when Godard aligns the plight of Paula's paramour with left-wing Moroccan opposition leader Ben Barka, who also disappeared for months before his body was discovered (he had been tortured to death).

Consequently, tone and pacing tend to vary wildly, contributing to the picture's poor reception in some quarters, although a few contemporary critics, like David Phelps and Jonathan Rosenbaum, consider it among the filmmaker's finest works.

It's also worth noting that Godard shot his 12th film at the same time as Two or Three Things I Know About Her, which has been more widely seen and celebrated over the years. Nonetheless, I prefer Made in U.S.A., particularly since Godard largely avoids the didacticism that would mar much of his output in subsequent decades. Just as Chinatown and Atlantic City signify places and ideas of places, Made in U.S.A. signifies a place and an idea of a place: the inside of Jean-Luc Godard's big, beautiful brain.

* The pen name of author Donald E. Westlake, whose novel inspired Point Blank.

***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** *****

"I started off intending to make a simple film; and for the first time I tried to tell
a story. But it isn't my way of doing things. I don't know how to tell stories. I want
to cover the whole ground, from all possible angles, saying everything at once."
-- Jean-Luc Godard, La Nouvel Observateur (1966)



Made in U.S.A. continues at the Northwest Film Forum through 7/9 at 7 and 9pm.
The NWFF is located at 1515 12th Ave. For more information, please click here or call 206-829-7863. Incidentally, though never before available in the US, Criterion now lists a DVD release date of 7/21. Images from The Auteurs and DVD Beaver.

Everything Dies: Godard's Made in U.S.A., Part One

MADE IN U.S.A.
(Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1966, 90 mins)

"Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."--Walsh (Joe Mantell), Chinatown (1974) 

"Everything dies, baby, that's a fact."--Bruce Springsteen, "Atlantic City" (1982)

***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** *****

In Polish-American transplant Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974), the title signifies a place and an idea of a place. In Louis Malle's Atlantic City (1980), the title signifies a place and an idea of a place, but the French filmmaker actually shot his character piece in the American city of the same name, while LA's Chinatown only cameos in Polanski's classic noir.

France's Jean-Luc Godard beat both of his contemporaries to the punch with Made in U.S.A., which takes place entirely in a fictional "Atlantic-Cité." The great thing about the concept is that Godard makes no attempt to disguise the fact that he shot his film in Paris with a Gallic cast speaking en français (further, according to Rialto's press notes, the word "cité," in his native country, "usually refers to a housing project").

Though British singer Marianne Faithfull drops by to sing 1964's "As Tears Go By"--acappella, no less--this is still a French filmmaker's comment on American pop culture and the future of the left, circa 1966 (two years later, Godard made Sympathy for the Devil with the song's authors, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and the rest of the Rolling Stones).

Click here for part two

Not to be confused with the Lori Singer/Adrian Pasdar picture, Made in U.S.A., in a new 35mm print, plays the Northwest Film Forum through 7/9 at 7 and 9pm (no 9pm screening on 7/4). Never on TV, video, or DVD. The NWFF is located at 1515 12th Ave. between Pike and Pine. For more information, please click here or call 206-829-7863. Image from Tout le Cine and The French American Chamber of Commerce.

The Merry Gentleman: Let Nothing You Dismay

THE MERRY GENTLEMAN (Michael Keaton, US, 2008, 97 mins.) "We're like two peas in a pod." Once upon a time he was a versatile comic presence who moved from sitcoms in the 1970s (Working Stiffs) to Ron Howard laughers (Night Shift, Gung Ho) in the 19- 80s. He was, in other words, on the same career track as Splash-era Tom Hanks. Then he turned away from the light towards the darkness of the Caped Crusader (and long before he launched his movie career, he was a Pittsburgh kid serving as a stage hand on Mister Rogers Neighborhood). Whether by choice or by necessity, actor Michael Keaton has kept a lower profile ever since, though he’s done some of his most interesting work—like Jackie Brown and Game 6—in the intervening years. Now he makes his directorial debut with The Merry Gentleman, which isn’t a topic- al comedy like Mr. Mom, a Tim Burton bauble like Beetle Juice, or even a suburban chiller like Pacific Heights, but a two-pronged character study shot in shades of noir. “It’s not uncommon to mistake boredom for hunger.” The set-up begins in Chicago with a man (Keaton) and woman (Kelly Macdonald), leading separate lives. The woman, who lives in another city with another man (Bob- by Cannavale) enters the scene with a bruised eye. After the other man leaves for work, she packs up her stuff, catches a plane to Illinois, and starts a new life. Meanwhile, Keaton’s Frank Logan watches a trio of men leave a corner bar while he swigs what looks like cough syrup. Moments later, he shoots one of them dead. Then, while planning another hit, he spies Kate Frazier, now working as a reception- ist, through his viewfinder. She notices him on the roof, screams, and then calls the police because she thought he was going to jump. He disappears, but after a second murder, they return to question her about the man she saw. In the process, alcohol- ic Officer Dave Murcheson (Tom Bastounes) provides a third narrative strand that comments on the first two, since he falls for Kate while looking for Frank. Now, Frank’s got two bodies to his name and a connection to Kate, who tells dif- ferent people different stories about her shiner—and about her marital status. From the opening sequence, the film appears to share thematic similarities with John Dahl’s Chicago-situated You Kill Me with Ben Kingsley as an alcoholic hit man and Téa Leoni as a fellow tippler, except The Merry Gentleman isn’t a black comedy, despite a few subtle comic touches, like the world's most depressing office Christmas party. Plus, the central duo doesn’t really meet until the halfway point, not counting an earlier, "unplanned" encounter in Kate’s building. So, Frank does Kate a good turn (helps her with her tree), and she does one for him (takes him to the hospital after he passes out), unaware that this considerate stranger is also a skilled assassin. If a first film reveals where an actor-turned-director’s head is at, then Keaton’s mind is in a dimly-lit, but not hopeless place. The Merry Gentleman starts out as a two-hander, but Macdonald gets all the best scenes, while he barely speaks a word. Frank’s die is cast, but Kate’s future is unwritten, and a hit man helps her to write it. In the end, Keaton’s carefully observed debut is so low-key it could slip between the cracks of the summer movie season, especially since the studio chose not to release it around the holidays as they should have, but like its characters, the film could use a little affection: it’s as if Edward Hopper turned to digital video instead of paint. "You just might be the sweetest man I’ve ever met." Endnote: According to WENN, “Keaton took over…when filmmaker Ron Lazzeretti's appendix burst.” (Also, I'm adding the actor to my Men with Eyeliner list.) The Mer- ry Gentleman opens today at the Uptown Theater (511 Queen Anne Avenue N). For more information, please click here. Images from the Samuel Goldwyn Company.

Cold Souls: What Does Your Soul Look Like?

COLD SOULS [***] (Sophie Barthes, US, 97 mins.) In debut director Sophie Barthes' believably surreal world, lovingly shot by Andrij Parekh, human beings can live without their souls--but it isn't much of a way to live. Last seen duking it out with Tom Wilkinson in Duplicity, Paul Giamatti plays a look- ing-glass version of himself, an award-winning actor top-lining Chekhov's Uncle Van- ya. When the strain becomes too much to bear, he pays a visit to Soul Storage, where Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn) offers to store his soul during the run of the play. After Flintstein's assistant (Lauren Ambrose) extracts it, the lighter Paul can no longer handle Vanya's heaviness, so he tries on the soul of a Russian poet. It's an improvement, but Giamatti would rather have his own chickpea-sized soul back. Unfortunately, it's gone missing. Flintstein's associate, Nina (Dina Korzun, 40 Shades of Blue), a Russian mule, has borrowed it on her boss's orders, where it re- sides in the body of his actress wife, so Giamatti enlists Nina's help to get it back. His sad and hilarious journey from well-heeled Manhattan to the St. Peters- berg underworld occasionally recalls Charlie Kaufman's existential comedies, except the French-born filmmaker, who has cited Carl Jung and Woody Allen as inspirations, conjures up her own unique universe, where European litera- ture and philosophy rub shoulders with American ingenuity and impatience. ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** Cold Souls plays the Harvard Exit on 6/8 at 7pm and on 6/10 at 4:30pm. Director and actor in attendance. Endnote: Edited and revised from my Amazon review. Title from a track by DJ Shadow. Images from Row Three and The LA Weekly.

Quick Hits: Food, Inc. and Summer Hours

SIFF screenings for the following have ended, but one title has already opened in Seattle, while the other opens shortly.  

FOOD, INC. ***  

Food, Inc. examines the costs of putting value and convenience over nutrition and environmental impact. Robert Kenner explores the subject from all angles, talking to farmers, activists, and authors, like producer Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), and takes his camera into factory farms and abattoirs where chicken grow too fast to walk properly, cows eat feed pumped with toxic chemicals, and illegal immigrants risk life and limb to bring these products to market at an affordable cost. 

If eco-docs, like Super-Size Me and King Corn, tend to preach to the converted, Kenner presents his findings in such an engaging fashion that Food, Inc. may well reach the very viewers who could benefit from it the most: harried workers who don't have the time or income to read every book and to eat non-genetically modified produce every day. Click here for the accompanying book. Food Inc. opens on June 26 (venue TBA).  

SUMMER HOURS ****  

What interests me in the movie in not so much the material value of things, but their symbolic value.-- Olivier Assayas in the production notes 

For a film about objects, Summer Hours presents a surprisingly affecting scenario. Then again, Olivier Assayas has never taken the easy road to catharsis. It's no spoiler to note that family matriarch Hélène (Edith Scob) passes away shortly after her 75th birthday, at which she tells her three adult children (Charles Berling, Juliet- te Binoche, and Jérémie Renier), that they're free to do what they want with her precious objets d’art, including Musée d’Orsay-loaned works by Degas and Redon. Were he a different kind of director, the superficial would lock horns with the righteous, but these characters aren't quite so simplistic. Largely devoid of music, once an Assayas signature, the movie ends with a raucous house party that recalls his 1994 feature Cold Water, and Berling continues to do some of his finest work for the filmmaker, anchoring this deceptively rich picture with his subtle performance. Summer Hours, which opened on 5/29, continues at the Harvard Exit.  

Sidenote: Though I've been avidly following Assayas' career for 15 years now, I wasn't a big fan of his last film. For Video Librarian, I wrote, "The last act plays like an attempt at a Johnny To crime drama with guns, drugs, and double-crossings (Kel- ly Lin is a To veteran), but Assayas lacks the flair for this kind of thing. Intimacy has always been one of his specialties, and Boarding Gate feels like an exercise in detachment. Despite [Asia] Argento's earthy sexuality, there's no real heat."  

Other recommended openings (all playing at Landmark Theatres TBA): Tulpan (6/26), Moon (7/3), The Hurt Locker (7/10), In the Loop (7/31), and The Cove (8/7). 

Endnote: Food, Inc. image from Common Sense Media.