“Jesus wanted me to have that truck,” ex-convict Jack insists early on in 21 Grams, blissfully unaware that he will soon be behind the wheel when it kills two young girls and their father, Michael. His prosperity has come as a direct result of his conversion, he believes, preordained by a loving, omniscient God. From our perspective too, there was no other way this sequence of events could have unfolded. Jack’s fate is woven into the very structure of Alejandro Iñárritu’s splintered narrative, as are the destinies of former drug addict Cristina and maths professor Paul, pulling these strangers to the centre of a whirlpool that drowns them in guilt, grief, and a pressing sense of their own mortality.
The result is purposefully disorientating, throwing us not only between three colliding stories, but also across their respective timelines. Right as Cristina receives the devastating news that her family has been hit by a truck, we also see a shaken Jack arriving late to his birthday party, confessing to his wife Marianne what he has done. Suddenly, we jump several months forward to Jack driving Cristina and a mortally wounded Paul to the hospital – only to then leap back to Paul being given Michael’s heart, wondering whose death saved him from a life-threatening illness. On a broad level, this narrative indeed progresses from start to finish, yet its asynchronous flow is as jarringly fractured as the lives of its tormented characters.
The religious faith which once uplifted Jack becomes a burden as he wrestles with a guilty conscience.Splintering characters through the visuals as well as the narrative, reducing them to broken pieces of themselves.
Even more than the examination of humanity’s interconnectedness from Iñárritu’s previous film Amores Perros, 21 Grams binds these strangers together in close physical proximity. No one here truly lives in isolation, so each time we cut to a disconnected scene without the context of what immediately preceded it, we find ourselves trying to fill in the gaps. Showing Cristina smelling her children’s clothes, ambiguously proclaim “We have to kill him” in her next scene, and then bake a cake with her daughters a few minutes later not only whips us between her the emotional extremes of character arc. In moments of happiness, this formal fragmentation instils sorrow, and we equally recall memories of innocent joy as we behold unconscionable devastation.
Scenes of a jaded, vengeful Cristina contrast heavily against scenes of domestic bliss – her evolution is raw and jarring as both ends of this arc are placed next to each other.
From the disordered information provided to us, we gradually infer what has happened and what is yet to unfold. Like these characters though, still we long for the catharsis of deeper understanding. Jack may be burdened by a guilty conscience after all, but there is no doubt in his mind that this tragedy was anything but an accident. If God gave him that truck, then doesn’t it stand to reason that he was chosen to carry out this manslaughter? If so, then how can he possibly love a God who doesn’t simply allow suffering, but decides who should live with the responsibility of inflicting it?
Where Jack’s belief in a fatalistic cosmos is furiously directed towards an all-powerful deity, Iñárritu lays out a formal contrast through Paul’s scientific determinism, heavily informed by his background as a maths teacher. “There’s a number hidden in every act of life, in every aspect of the universe,” he passionately expounds to Cristina, trying to express his own growing fondness for her. Everything that will ever happen is already written into the code of the universe, he maintains, invisible to the eye of its unassuming inhabitants.
“Numbers are a door to understanding a mystery that’s bigger than us. How two people, strangers, come to meet.”
Strangers connected and broken apart by tragedy, written into the very code of the universe.
Indeed, what looks at first glance to be sheer randomness in these lives is rather governed by many intersecting causal relationships. Whether one finds joy or tragedy in this complex web of probabilities is purely a matter of subjective experience, yet from the macro perspective Iñárritu grants us in 21 Grams, we also find a spiritual communion of their souls. Although they find themselves on divergent sides of this accident as a perpetrator, a survivor, and a benefactor, all three understand each other better than they realise.
It is largely through the three leading performances that we see these parallels emerge as well, balancing out the film’s expansive scope with raw, interior insight. Benicio del Toro’s tired resignation to suicidal depression, Sean Penn’s melancholy reckoning with the inevitability of death, and Naomi Watts’ grief-stricken regression into unhealthy behaviours are delivered with mesmerising naturalism, exposing all three at their most psychologically vulnerable.
A weary resignation to suicidal depression in Benicio del Toro’s performance, seeing guilt cannibalise a man from the inside out.Mortality weighs heavy on Sean Penn’s soul, accepting the inevitability of death.A prime achievement of acting from Naomi Watts, shattered by an unfathomable grief which violently twists her soul.
For Watts in particular, the fateful disaster which destroyed her entire family haunts her like a recurring nightmare. The first time it unfolds, we are with her at home, unaware that the voicemail she receives will be the last words she hears them speak. The second time, we are with them on the street, hanging on the excruciating seconds immediately preceding the accident. Finally, we visit the site with Cristina herself, replaying the brief audio message as the camera circles her in shaky, handheld motions. Even according to her own experience, this tragedy cannot be confined to a single point-of-view. As we witness in such pointed formal repetition, it instead warps and echoes into distortions of itself, existing somewhere between an objective historical event and intense, undistilled emotion.
Echoes of tragedy, the first time playing as a voicemail when Cristina arrives home…The second time as a flashback…And the third time as a memory, following her as she walks down the street where her family died.
By physically tampering with the film stock as well, Iñárritu alters the crude, gritty texture of his visuals according to each characters’ psychological state, heightening the varying impact of their trauma. This largely comes through the bleach bypass effect, deliberately skipping steps of film processing to increase contrast and decrease saturation, while using a colour cast to wash a faded green tint over its harshest scenes in the prison and hospital. Along with Rodrigo Prieto’s jittery camerawork and Gustavo Santaolalla’s sombre, reverberating score, these stylistic treatments consume us wholly in Jack, Paul, and Cristina’s collective vulnerability, lulling us into a hypnotic submission to fate’s unpredictable hand.
Iñárritu underscores the grittiness of his mise-en-scène by tampering with his film stock, accentuating the coarseness of the film grain.Green colour grading and lighting woven through 21 Grams, tinting the imagery with sickly hues.
There is a thin line between resignation and acceptance though, and much of it lies in the context one places their own life, regardless of the path that has been travelled. Every so often, Iñárritu grants us reprieve from his arduous narrative by way of cutaways, deeply infused with metaphysical wonder as birds take flight at sunset and leaves blow in the breeze. This complex world evidently sprawls further out than these three interconnected characters, and as their stories finally converge upon a montage of memories and pensive deliberations, there is even a touch of Terrence Malick in its meditative flow.
Visual poetry in the flying birds and leaves, revealed in cutaways as we pensively reflect on the fleeting places these characters occupy in an enormous world.
“How many lives do we live? How many times do we die?” Paul reflects as he faces the end of his life for the third time in the film.
“They say we all lose 21 grams at the exact moment of our death. Everyone. And how much fits into 21 grams? How much is lost? When do we lose 21 grams? How much goes with them? How much is gained?”
True to the maths professor’s instincts, an exact number is placed upon the weight of a human life, yet still his thirst for knowledge remains unsatiated. As far as Jack, Paul, and Cristina are concerned, its impact is immeasurable, echoing across a vast network of seemingly trivial yet unfathomably intricate relationships. At least through the fractured storytelling of 21 Grams, Iñárritu gifts us a miraculous glimpse into this infinite expanse, and the terrible, intimate burden it imposes on our souls.
21 Grams is currently streaming on Binge, and is available to rent or buy on Apple TV, YouTube, and Amazon Video.
Somewhere in the unnamed Swedish city of Songs from the Second Floor, a crash test dummy falls seemingly out of nowhere into a quarry. In a lavish hall, a crowd of clerics, aristocrats, generals, and businessmen prepare a young girl called Anna for a mysterious task. Finally, Roy Andersson pays off both scenes in a darkly funny punchline that leads the child along the top of a cliff, before sending her plummeting to an unseen death. As the same elites who groomed her for this ritual passively bear witness, a mournful hymn builds to a crescendo, commemorating the innocent life they have sacrificed to whatever gods might save them from the insipid, desolate hell they themselves have built on Earth.
Like an artist curating a solo exhibition, Roy Andersson is compiling a gallery of evocative tableaux that each express their own self-contained story in Songs from the Second Floor. No single image here reveals the full apocalyptic senselessness that this city of eternal traffic jams and mind-numbing bureaucracy has descended into, but when each are considered in unison, a more expansive landscape begins to form of surreal, urban decay. There is no redemption for bosses who fire their most loyal staff after 30 years of service, and no hope for the employee who pathetically clings to his superior’s leg as he is dragged crying down office hallways. All that can be done is to bury the shame deep down – though where is the sanity in that when humanity’s moral failures pervade the mundanity of everyday life?
A crash test dummy falls from a cliff onto a pile of rocks.A young girl is groomed for a mysterious tasks by a crowd of adults.Both vignettes come together and deliver an incredibly dark punchline – the young girl is sacrificed at the edge of the cliff, observed by members of society’s elite.
Individual scenes here vary between tightly interwoven episodes and standalone vignettes, yet each play their role in Andersson’s astoundingly formal world building, erecting life-sized dioramas that trap pale, lethargic characters in Edward Hopper-style paintings. There is a complete absence of in-scene editing, and in its place we find a consistent dedication to wide, static shots with a remarkable depth of field, often extending highly stylised sets far into the distance where background figures carry out their day-to-day routines. At its most absurd, this manifests as a procession of flagellating businessmen trudging their way through the perpetual congestion, hoping to find atonement through self-punishment like the masochistic monks from The Seventh Seal. Even when life beyond the immediate setting isn’t visible though, the noise of road rage and car horns can often be heard from just outside enclosed walls, rooting these trivial, woeful tales within a common dystopia.
Detail in Andersson’s world building, calling back to the masochistic monks of The Seventh Seal with this procession of businessmen and women whipping themselves through the city’s busy streets.
Perhaps the only thing holding Andersson’s film back from total melancholy is its sharply attuned, deadpan satire, carried by his idiosyncratic ensemble and revealing a civilisation that has reached a point of unsalvageable stagnation. Comparisons to Jacques Tati and Wes Anderson’s playful mockeries of modern society are apt, especially in their meticulous manufacturing of eccentric structures to speak for their monotonal characters, though Andersson’s humour possesses a far darker edge than either. Without physical slapstick or whimsical montages driving its narrative forward, Songs from the Second Floor languishes in the uncomfortable silence of awkward interactions, washed out by drab, desaturated colour palettes sapped of life.
Truly pathetic characters – we pity them as they grovel at the feet of their superiors, and as others quietly watch on from their offices.Surreal perfection in Andersson’s mise-en-scène, establishing the flat, low-contrast visual style that he would continue to stick to from this point on in his career.
Although Federico Fellini’s cinematic chaos does not draw so clean a parallel, Andersson’s condemnation of an indulgent, undignified culture reveals this influence to be particularly potent. Much like the Italian director’s later films, Andersson’s surreal imagery and episodic narrative unveil the egocentric irony in human suffering, manifesting as miserable self-pity afflicting an entire civilisation. When strangers are beaten up in public, injured in a botched magic trick, and stuck in a train door, bystanders in Songs from the Second Floor watch on with blank expressions, preferring to keep a distance from those who desperately need help.
A formal dedication to vignettes, each played with absurd deadpan as bystanders observe the suffering of others from a neutral distance.
Then again, perhaps it is the very fact that everyone is occupied by their own personal burdens which keeps them from stepping forward. In a particularly Felliniesque metaphor, Andersson stages what seems like hundreds of travellers at an airport terminal dragging overloaded trolleys of luggage towards the counters, where hostesses wait with professional apathy. The soundscape of desperate groans almost sounds like a hellish torture chamber, and although the distance to cover is minor, it feels like an eternity away as bags begin to topple over.
Perhaps the single greatest shot from Andersson’s entire filmography, extending this airport terminal deep into the background as passengers struggle with their towers of luggage.
Clearly everyone has their crosses to bear, and for some in Songs from the Second Floor, these manifest quite literally. If Andersson centres any character in this expansive tapestry of miserable lives, then it must be the middle-aged salesman Kalle who burns down his furniture business, attempts to claim insurance on it, and decides to join his old friend Uffe hustling religious paraphernalia. Lugging a crucifix-shaped package through train stations and cafeterias, he expects to find some financial or spiritual salvation, albeit one which never materialises. Religion is reduced to nothing more than a cheap commercial enterprise, and when he decides to seek genuine solace in a church, even the vicar is too preoccupied by his own troubles to consider the needs of his congregation.
“At the end of your wits… so who isn’t? I’ve been trying to get my house sold for four years.”
Glimpses of spiritual transcendence as train passengers burst out into an operatic chorus, while Kalle remains woefully apathetic.Andersson’s satirical critique of religion evokes Luis Buñuel, cutting into the con artists and salesmen who turn a profit on religious paraphernalia.
This is not to say that Kalle’s world is absent of mysticism or empathy. The aggrieved entrepreneur is simply too blind or deaf to appreciate it, even ignoring the melancholy, operatic chorus sung by surrounding commuters on a train. Their shared sorrows swell in beautiful harmony, carrying over to the following scene in a diner as well where Andersson reveals just how far this song of suffering resonates. Neither does Kalle grasp the divine enlightenment that his son Thomas has been blessed with, yet which has tragically condemned him to a psychiatric hospital. “Beloved be the one who sleeps on his back,” he proclaims, quoting Peruvian poet César Vallejo, before continuing to exalt all those overlooked by a complacent society.
“Beloved be the bald man without a hat.
Beloved be the one who catches a finger in the door.”
This poetry is the reason Thomas has gone insane, Kalle claims, so it is ironic indeed that each visit ends with the salesman being forcibly removed by hospital staff for his furious breakdowns. The resemblance Thomas’ words bear to the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount is certainly no coincidence here. He is a Christlike figure, albeit one who has been debilitated by a culture which sees his wisdom and calls it madness. He is no Son of God, but neither was Jesus, Thomas asserts – he was simply a man who was tormented to death for his kindness.
Thomas is the closest thing to a pure, moral figure that this film has, confined to a psychiatric hospital and called mad for his offbeat wisdom.
Still, the guilt which lingers beneath society’s thin veneer of apathy cannot be entirely ignored. The only time Andersson’s camera moves in Songs from the Second Floor is at the point where reality almost entirely breaks down, seeing it track backwards along a train platform where a man with bleeding wrists follows Kalle. This is Sven, we soon learn, a man who Kalle once owed money to yet eventually took his own life before being repaid. Kalle was not directly responsible for his death, though he sheepishly confesses to feeling relieved upon hearing the news.
Not far behind Sven is another spectre, though this one manifests as a far greater trauma in European history. Approaching Kalle with a noose around his neck, a young Russian who was hung by Nazi Germany is looking for his similarly deceased sister, hoping to apologise for his transgressions. Kalle has never met him before, yet still he feels a sense of shame as the foreign ghost stalks him through the city. “You’ll have to forgive me, but I’m afraid I can’t help you because I can’t understand what you’re saying,” Kalle weakly apologises as the boy pleads to him in his own language, though this is evidently little more than a convenient excuse for an embarrassingly disinterested man.
Echoes of European history haunt Kalle as ghosts, underscoring Sweden’s national guilt.
When all is said and done, was Sweden’s diplomatic policy of neutrality in World War II not a radical position in itself, granting themselves permission to sit by as millions died across the Baltic Sea? Elsewhere at a nursing home, the staff who celebrate a senile general’s 100th birthday ignore his Nazi salute and deluded greeting to Hitler’s right-hand man, as Andersson further characterises a nation whose self-proclaimed tolerance is also its greatest flaw. These ghosts may fade into obscurity, but they never truly disappear as long as the living refuse to address the torment they have inflicted and suffered, leaving the dead to amass an overwhelming force in the film’s closing minutes.
Nazis live on in modern day Sweden, shoved away into nursing homes so society doesn’t have to think too much about them.
Just outside the city’s borders, Kalle meets with his friend Uffe, who has given up his business. “How can you make money on a crucified loser?” he grumbles, hurling crosses onto a pile of junk. Religion has apparently fallen so far from the mainstream, no one even is even seeking the empty promises of its cheap icons. We can’t quite make out the faces of the people trudging towards him in the far distance, but when Uffe finally leaves, Kalle is quick to identify the leader.
“Why are you chasing me, Sven? Why are you tormenting me? I can’t make it up to you. How could I do that? You have no relatives. What can I do? Sven! Can we not treat each other decently? Forget it all. The past… just look ahead!”
The trash that he throws is enough to scare some off, and yet a hundred more rise from the earth, continuing their zombie-like march. Kalle whimpers, resigned to his fate, and though Andersson does not linger on this shot long enough to reveal what that might be, we do finally recognise the girl at the front.
An eerie, ambiguous conclusion as the sacrificed girl leads a crowd of ghosts to Kalle, forcing a terrifying confrontation with his own conscience.
After all, how could we ever forget that chilling image of a blindfolded child being led to her death along a cliff top? Like Sven and the Russian boy, Anna’s spirit continues to haunt those who call society’s evils ‘necessary’ and shirk moral responsibility. It wasn’t long after her demise that those who bore witness tried to drown their guilt at a hotel bar, we recall. There, an elderly aristocrat vomits on the countertop, a woman struggles to pick herself up off the floor, and one man’s demented cry eerily spreads through the establishment. “Where are we?” they collectively moan in confused discord, as if coming to the realisation that this modern hell has been nightmarishly fashioned from the reality they once believed in. As far we are concerned in Songs from the Second Floor too, this existential question might as well echo across the entire city.
This city is a nightmarish limbo, designed by those who wield absolute power yet ironically wonder where it all went wrong.
Songs from the Second Floor is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.
Tormented by a lack of answers to his perpetual misfortune, Jewish physics professor Larry Gopnik meets with three rabbis in A Serious Man. The first is a young optimist fresh out of college, naively suggesting that Larry simply needs to shift his disposition. “The parking lot here. Not much to see,” he ponders, staring out his office window. “But if you imagine yourself a visitor, somebody who isn’t familiar with these autos and such. Somebody still with a capacity for wonder. Someone with a fresh… perspective.” Larry’s frustration with his frivolous metaphor is plain to see.
The second rabbi chooses to share an anecdote from a member of his synagogue – a dentist bewildered by the Hebrew scripture he finds engraved on the teeth of a non-Jewish patient. Driven to uncover what this could mean and how it got there, the dentist pursued the mystery to all ends, and eventually approached the rabbi to hear his insight. “So what did you tell him?” Larry eagerly asks, only to be met with curt indifference.
“Is it relevant?”
Still searching for a shred of guidance, Larry does not even make it all the way into the office of the final and most senior rabbi. He is busy, the secretary tells him, despite our view of the clearly unoccupied old man sitting at his desk.
The first rabbi – a young, naive optimist with nothing to offer but shallow metaphors.The second rabbi – a spinner of yarns who sees life’s mystery, yet lacks the curiosity to pursue answers.The third rabbi – a shrivelled old man whose potential wisdom remains just out of reach.
The fact that this seems like the run-up to a joke with no punchline is absolutely intentional on the Coen Brothers’ behalf, typifying their darkly ironic sense of humour. In these three rabbis, we find three answers that religion commonly gives to tough philosophical questions, including one total non-response. There is no grand revelation that inspires or consoles us. Instead, we find a mirror to the long, elaborate setup that is Larry’s life, prompting us to similarly ask – what is all this leading to? Is there a guiding hand behind the breakdown of his marriage to Judith, his brother’s legal woes, and his son’s troubles at Hebrew school? And if so, why must this suffering be inflicted on a man who by most accounts is a relatively good person?
Surrounded by books in the mise-en-scène, and yet none of these volumes can answer Larry’s burning spiritual questions.A magnificent frame – Larry is quite literally overwhelmed by figures and vharts in his attempt to understand the cosmos. He is a man of science, yet he remains deeply unsatisfied by his worldly knowledge.
That Larry makes a career out of searching for meaning through numbers certainly complements this existential character study too, and is perfectly distilled in his lecture on the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, suggesting that two conflicting states of being may simultaneously exist until they are observed. He is a man of both science and faith, and as far as he is aware, God both exists and does not. The mise-en-scène surrounds him with books in his attorney’s office and shrinks him beneath a colossal blackboard of equations, but all the information in the world cannot point to a simple yes or no answer.
The film as a whole is no great cinematographic triumph from Roger Deakins, yet in moments like these he draws a clean minimalism through Larry’s cookie-cutter neighbourhood and local synagogue, then every so often tips it off balance with canted angles, hazy drug trips, and surreal nightmares that bleed into reality. The discomfort is pervasive, eroding our trust in the security of Larry’s day-to-day existence, and prompting us to adopt his tentative doubt. Perhaps it would be comforting to believe in God, but then why is he being punished so cruelly? If there really is no sense to it all, how can he reckon with the random whims of pure chaos?
Oblique shots and high angles in the local synagogue, tipping the clean, orderly setting off-balance.Much like his son, Larry turns to drugs, and Deakins’ visuals hazily shift with his reality.
Although Larry’s journey from one tribulation to the next is not difficult to follow, the formal intricacies and allusions to the Book of Job place A Serious Man among the Coen Brothers’ most profoundly enigmatic works. We are condemned to the same ungratifying search for answers as our protagonist, so the decision to set the first scene of his story far outside his perspective is a bold one indeed. This prologue grounds the film in 19th century Jewish folklore, recounting the tale of a married couple faced with a terrifying uncertainty. Is the man they have invited into their house truly human, or rather a dybbuk – that is, an evil spirit in disguise? After the wife stabs the visitor, he wanders outside into the snow, leaving this question frighteningly ambiguous. If these are Larry’s ancestors and the old man was indeed a dybbuk, then perhaps this is the source of the curse which would ruin his life over a century later. If the visitor was a living being, maybe our protagonist is just a very unlucky man.
The Coen Brothers’ haunting prologue plays out an ambiguous fable foreshadowing Larry’s spiritual uncertainty, as well as his incredible misfortune.
From there, the Coen Brothers weave a tapestry of subplots through A Serious Man that mirror Larry’s identity in others. In his wife’s lover, Sy, he finds the well-respected “serious man” he wishes he could be – albeit one who coincidentally perishes in a road accident at the exact moment Larry crashes his own car. In his brother Arthur, he sees an even more broken version of himself, to whom he offers the same impractical guidance that others try to give him. As for his son Danny who struggles to fit in at school, there the Coen Brothers model a smaller scale version of his own ethical dilemmas. Is Larry justified in sleeping with his neighbour and experimenting with marijuana, now that he has split from his wife? What about accepting a monetary bribe from another student in exchange for a passing grade? If he is already being unjustly chastened by God, surely crossing these moral boundaries won’t make difference – and if God doesn’t exist, then who really cares?
Arthur’s brokenness reveals the true depths of Larry’s despair, as well as his inability to help either himself or his brother.Danny wanders through adolescence without moral certainty or guidance, and as we see in his father, answers don’t come easily with age.
It is along this line of thinking though that Larry lets his sense of accountability gradually wear away in A Serious Man, spurred on by a helpless passivity. Danny’s subscription to the Columbia Record Club under his father’s name isn’t exactly fair, yet Larry is still responsible for making the overdue payments anyway. He reasons that he shouldn’t be punished for not doing anything, but since new vinyls are automatically mailed without customer intervention, it is precisely his inaction that has landed him in this situation.
The more we begin to recognise this dysfunctional trait in Larry, the more we see how his inclination to dwell in self-pity is at least partly responsible for many of his other problems too. He did not need to move out of his family home without standing his ground, and neither did he need to give into the pressure of paying for Sy’s funeral. Michael Stuhlbarg’s sheepish demeanour embodies every bit of this unassertive meekness, barely pushing his soft, reedy voice past a moderate speaking volume even when he shouts. Instead, he focuses all his anger at a God whose old-fashioned retribution seems ill-fitting to his upstanding lifestyle, and who conveniently isn’t present to verbally retaliate.
A Serious Man put Michael Stuhlbarg on the map, playing to his strengths as an immensely introspective actor who can communicate entire thought processes through a simple facial expression.
If there is a divine message to be found anywhere in A Serious Man, then it is ironic that it should come from the reclusive senior rabbi who previously declined a meeting with Larry. Instead, it is Danny who is chosen to receive his cryptic wisdom, delivered in the form of song lyrics.
“When the truth is found to be lies,
And all the hope within you dies… then what?”
Even those who aren’t familiar with ‘Somebody to Love’ by Jefferson Airplane would recognise these words from the film’s recurring musical motif. Its urgent rhythms accompany Larry’s philosophical journey with a raw, driving intensity, yet still he overlooks his life’s missing purpose hidden plainly in the song’s very title. As if to answer the question he has posed Danny, the rabbi ends their brief meeting with a simple yet valuable instruction.
“Be a good boy.”
Finally, we hear the esoteric wisdom from the third rabbi – though Larry is not the one to receive it, and its meaning is far from apparent.
Living with such uncertainty, is this moral imperative not the best we can do? If every one of Larry’s trials has been a test of his integrity, then has he succeeded? The Coen Brothers rarely give us the endings we expect to their films, yet with the mighty coincidence that turns up at Larry’s doorstep the moment he takes his first truly sinful action, they once again prove why they are among their generation’s best screenwriters. Drowning in legal fees, the bribe his student left on his desk begins to look very attractive, and no more than a second after he decides to give into temptation does the phone ring with dire news on the other end.
A turning point for Larry as he transgresses his own moral boundaries – pain, desperation, and self-loathing in his expression.
The tornado which simultaneously approaches Danny’s school only compounds our suspicion that Larry is being punished for a relatively minor transgression, once again suggesting a visitation of the father’s sins upon his children, and referencing the Book of Job where God appeared to his tormented follower as a whirlwind. The Coen Brothers’ parallel editing evocatively binds both the fatal disease and natural disaster together as a chilling, fateful condemnation, yet still we must question – isn’t this totally disproportionate to the sin that was committed? Must Larry now endure the ultimate catastrophe for cutting a moral corner that anyone under similar duress would also disregard?
Biblical symbolism as a whirlwind threatens to end the life of Larry’s offspring – retribution sent from the heavens.
Or is this merely a convenient explanation we would like to apply to the chaotic winds of chance? After all, those with who listen closely may pick up on the phone’s muffled ring first sounding immediately before Larry changes his student’s grade, even though the sharp interruption of the second ring is the one we consciously notice. It seems a minor difference, but if we are considering cause and effect in broad ontological terms, then it bears incredible weight on how we view the universe. Maybe Larry was always going to meet this unremarkable end, and maybe living a moral life won’t save any of us from what’s coming. Without any firm assurances though, the Coen Brothers simply leave us to dwell in A Serious Man’s eerie, senseless ambiguity. When all is said and done, perhaps being a “good boy” is the best we can do with what little we’ve got.
A Serious Man currently available to rent or buy on Apple TV, YouTube, Amazon Video.
To Alfonso Cuarón, the story of Mexico’s political turbulence at the end of the twentieth century is not best understood through a historical epic or biopic. Y tu mamá también is far more interested in capturing its cultural and class tensions through the friendship of two teenage boys, completely indifferent to the dwindling power of the Industrial Revolutionary Party which held onto the presidency for the past 70 years, as well as the nation’s increasingly globalised economy. The world may be changing around them with wide-reaching implications, but they would much rather spend their time chasing women and upholding that self-devised, fraternal manifesto they claim is sacred, and yet so frequently stray from.
Despite their ignorance, Mexico’s modern politics are intimately intertwined with their personal relationships. After all, Tenoch’s upper-class background brings with it an air of superiority, seeing him use his foot to lift the toilet in Julio’s working-class home in much the same way he does at a shabby motel. Conversely, Julio is self-conscious at his friend’s more impressive house, lighting a match after using the bathroom. These adolescents may be hormonally aligned in their love for masturbation, sex, and all things masculine, but Y tu mamá también is acutely attentive to those differences that surface over the course of their beachbound road trip, specifically motivated by the prospect of charming their newest companion – the beautiful, 28-year-old Luisa.
Character detail in the tiniest actions, seeing Tenoch lift the toilet seat in the motel with his foot much the same way he does at Julio’s home. The framing of Julio in the mirror captures both boys in the shot too, drawing a division between them.Many marvellous long shots pushing the horizon to the bottom of the frame, revealing Mexico’s character through its landscapes.
By 2001, Cuarón had already established a solid filmmaking career moving from Mexico into Hollywood, and yet his greatest success to date comes here with a modest $5 million budget. In place of highly curated studio sets, beautiful long shots of rural Mexican countrysides, roads, and beaches connect us to the nation’s natural terrains and infrastructure, often placing the horizon towards the bottom of the frame while dusty blue skies and soft orange sunsets stretch out over detailed landscapes. His usual palette of murky greens is still occasionally present in his lighting and production design too, but Y tu mamá también is far more naturalistic than his previous films, opting for handheld camerawork that freely navigates scenes in long takes.
This is a specific sort of world-building that Cuarón would further explore in the smooth tracking shots of Children of Men and the steady pans of Roma, disengaging from his central characters to examine the details of their surrounding environments. In this instance, frivolous conversations remain audible even while our eyes wander elsewhere, drifting several times past family photos hanging on walls during phone calls, and elsewhere swinging inside a car to glance back at a pulled-over vehicle. Cuarón is sure to never quite sit long enough on these distractions to give us anything more than a vague glimpse – after all, Tenoch, Julio, or Luisa would much rather keep their heads down than consider their implications, though we are still left to wonder whether this traffic stop is a drug bust, an abuse of police power, or both.
Even with his turn to realism, Cuarón still finds the right moments to bring in his trademark green lighting and decor to brilliant effect.
Our travellers will encounter many more fragments of Mexico’s sprawling culture on their journey, some steeped in tradition with villagers stopping passing cars to pay a toll to their “little queen” dressed in bridal white, while others hint at widespread corruption. In a stroke of formal genius, Cuarón matches these diversions to the narration as well, frequently muting his diegetic sound before dropping in its commentary. These annotations are often as trivial as the camera’s fleeting observations too, offering brief cultural insights which mean little on their own, yet which together weave a textured landscape of poverty, celebration, and profound torment.
“If they had passed this spot 10 years earlier, they would have seen a couple of cages in the middle of the road… and then driven through a cloud of white feathers. Shortly after, more crushed cages, filled with bleeding chickens flapping their wings. Later on, an overturned truck, surrounded with smoke. Then they’d have seen two bodies on the road, one smaller than the other, barely covered by a jacket. And next to them, a woman crying inconsolably.”
Cuarón’s camera floats freely alongside the car during their road trip, listening in on their menial conversations. Every so often though, diegetic audio drops out to let the narration interrupt, making for a series of brilliant formal breaks.
On one level this narration positions us like readers of a novel, expanding the world through an omniscient literary voice, though this subversion of the narrative’s first-person continuity also bears great resemblance to Francois Truffaut’s formal experimentations during the French New Wave. The similarities to Jules and Jim especially are numerous, right down to the story of two friends being in love with one woman, and so it is also through Cuarón’s narration that we gain deeper insights into those thoughts they would rather keep hidden.
Y Tu Mamá También owes a lot of Truffaut’s carefree, rebellious style, but also lifts a lot from the love triangle of Jules and Jim with the two lovesick friends pining over one girl.
For the secretive Luisa, this is a particularly crucial conceit. As a funeral procession passes by, the narrator notes the existential concerns rising in her mind of how long she will be remembered after dying. We don’t know it at the time, but this is more relevant to her psychological state than we can imagine – she is suffering from terminal cancer, and this entire trip is one last hurrah to embrace life before it slips away. She may be more mature than her male companions, but she is just as adrift, and so it seems are many others they encounter. At one point, the narrator adopts future tense to reveal what is in store for a friendly fisherman who takes them in, and given the changing economic landscape, it does not look bright for him either.
“At the end of the year, Chuy and his family will have to leave their home, because a new luxury hotel will rise in San Bernabé. They will relocate to the outskirts of Santa María Colotepec. Chuy will attempt to give boat tours, but a collective of Acapulco boatmen supported by the local Tourism Board will block him. Two years later, he’ll end up as a janitor at the hotel. He will never fish again.”
It is evident that Luisa is facing her own secret tragedy in these brief asides, though the full context does not arrive until the end, bringing rich depths to a character that our protagonists initially view as a sexual conquest.Cuarón offers a glimpse into the future of a fisherman and his family, whose lives tangentially intersect with our protagonists. Their problems amount to very little in the broad scheme of things, but a tapestry is formally weaved from these tiny stories informing our view of an increasingly globalised, modern Mexico.A masterful use of natural lighting as the sun sets over this beachside paradise.
Tenoch and Julio might not see the point in contemplating the future, and yet Cuarón realises that their attempt at escapism is a political act in itself, refusing to acknowledge the complexities of the real world. As such, they are ill-equipped to face up to their own vulnerabilities and flaws as well. Their manifesto may forbid sleeping with each other’s girlfriends, and yet they do so anyway. They may openly share feelings for Luisa, but her first sexual encounter with Tenoch stings Julio all the same. Luisa might comfort Tenoch over his poor performance in bed, but he still takes it as a shameful weakness in his masculinity. In fact, almost any time some wedge is driven between these friends, sex is involved. Given the amount of it going on too, there is good reason for the constant conflict.
Only when these immature boys reach a point of self-acceptance and honesty does sex become pure, and perhaps the only straightforward thing in an incredibly complicated world. As they speak about their affairs for the first time without inhibition, Cuarón’s camera basks in the green glow of the seaside retreat, eventually following Luisa to the jukebox where she selects a song at random – the soft-rock ballad ‘Si No Te Hubieras Ido.’ Suddenly, she fixes her gaze right on the camera, intimately inviting us into their shared space as she begins to dance, with the boys soon joining her in a passionate embrace.
Luisa stares into the camera as she dances towards us, and is soon joined by Tenoch and Julio. Cuarón’s refusal to cut is remarkably effective, and key to the comfortable intimacy and love each character is feeling in this significant moment, wishing that it could last forever.This orgy momentarily erases the insecurity, ignorance, and masculine pretence that emotionally inhibits Julio and Tenoch, and for once sex is the least complicated thing in their lives.
There is no insecurity, ignorance, or masculine pretence in the orgy that soon consumes them. It won’t be long after this trip that Tenoch and Julio will go their separate ways, and Luisa will tragically pass away from cancer. So too will Mexican politics, culture, and economics continue to shift as the 21st century dawns, subtly contributing to this widening distance between old friends. Within this moment though, the ecstasy of the present is rightfully all that matters. Finally, there arises an equal affection in Y tu mamá también that neither insecurity, hierarchy, nor the uneasy advance of an early grave can suppress. The story of modern-day Mexico may vast, but this tiny coming-of-age chapter is just as formative to its identity as all those other lives caught in Cuarón’s expansive periphery.
The emotional intimacy of the past is once again repressed when Julio and Tenoch meet up in the future, having moved on with their lives. The memory of the past is both nostalgic and shameful, falling away to the pressures of modern day living, but it has still irrevocably changed them for the better.
Y Tu Mamá También can currently be bought on Amazon.
With The Lord of the Rings dominating so much of 21st century pop culture, it is easy to take for granted just how subversive J.R.R. Tolkien’s story was in the 1950s, even as he borrowed pieces of Greek, Nordic, and Germanic mythology. Our central hero is not some predestined Chosen One like Achilles, a legendary wizard such as Merlin, and does not possess the extraordinary physical strength of Beowulf, though these ancient archetypes certainly populate the narrative’s sidelines. Should any of these alternate characters attempt to fulfil the main quest at hand, they would be guaranteed almost certain failure. Humility and loyalty are far more important qualities here, neither of which are so easily corrupted by the One Ring that reaches into the minds of those with altruistic ambitions and twists them into selfish megalomaniacs.
As a result, Frodo Baggins the hobbit stands among the few figures uniquely capable of carrying and destroying this cursed artefact, and is consequently driven to separate himself from his Fellowship of powerful companions who may fall to its temptation. The Lord of the Rings stretches across an enormous span of land and time, yet by framing this ordinary creature who has never stepped far outside his home as our primary protagonist, Tolkien offers a fresh perspective that Peter Jackson gladly capitalises on in his cinematic adaptation.
The Lord of the Rings is one of the key texts that cannot be missed when talking about world building in either literature or cinema, and specifically in the film adaptations Jackson imbues his imagery with fantastical awe.
Through Frodo’s inexperienced eyes, we appreciate Middle Earth as one of the richest fictional worlds of literary history, complete with fully developed languages, genealogies, and cultures. While this film trilogy only touches on a small portion of Tolkien’s original creation, there is a wonder here that emerges from Jackson’s rendering of its extraordinary, almost imperceptible details. With enormous respect to the astonishing work of literature that had been placed in his hands, Jackson went about faithfully translating the written descriptions of great civilisations, creatures, and weapons to a visual medium, imbuing the design of each with a level of cultural and historical detail that takes multiple viewings to properly comprehend. Jackson realises that we do not need close-ups on the runes of Orc armour nor the embroidered textures of an Elven mourning dress to note their significance. Simply by including them in the frame, he viscerally conveys the sprawling authenticity of his intricately constructed world with minimal exposition, while occasionally compromising on the compositional beauty they may have offered with more precise framing.
Peter Jackson proves his mastery of long shots in The Lord of the Rings, crafting a vast world of astonishing beauty with the use of miniature models, matte paintings, and digital effects.
A huge portion of this fantastical visual style of course comes down to his fine synthesis of digital and practical effects too, more frequently relying on the latter with his matte paintings and miniature city models built into the side of imposing mountain ranges. Along with deserved comparisons to D.W. Griffith’s historical standard of epic filmmaking, Jackson makes a name for himself next to Georges Méliès with his in-camera illusions, shrinking hobbits and dwarves next to taller creatures with forced perspective angles. Meanwhile, CGI is judiciously used to elevate these practical effects rather than replace them, allowing an expressive motion-captured performance from Andy Serkis as Gollum that may have otherwise been limited beneath layers of prosthetics. As evidenced a decade later with The Hobbit trilogy, technological innovation does not equal art, but much like James Cameron and Christopher Nolan at their peaks, Jackson is primarily using it here as a tool for his grand storytelling and world-building.
Jackson uses forced perspective where he can to shoot actors in the same scene together when their characters have different heights – Elijah Wood is actually seated several feet behind Ian McKellen here.Another use of forced perspective to emphasise the ring in the foreground, using a specific version of the prop that was the size of a dinner plate.Some of the greatest motion-capture of modern cinema can be found in Andy Serkis’ performance as Gollum, tracing each facial expression that might have otherwise been lost beneath layers of prosthetics.
Even with all that stripped away though, there is no doubt to be had regarding the raw power of Tolkien’s narrative. In this epic battle between good and evil, there is a very simple objective uniting the Free Peoples of Middle Earth against Sauron, though it is often the smaller battles and personal motives which give a complex weight to this twelve-hour saga. The ensemble is huge, but the nuances of every relationship are worth savouring, from Aragorn’s love for the immortal Arwen, to Gandalf’s grandfatherly affection towards the hobbits. Even on repeat viewings, it still lands as a shock that his death takes place so early, foreshadowing the inevitable breaking of the Fellowship that splits the story into further subplots and develops individual characters through their isolation.
Jackson’s battle scenes are some of the greatest of cinema history for their clarity, editing, and geography, positioning The Lord of the Rings’ epic set pieces right next to D.W. Griffith’s.
Where Tolkien’s novels segmented each of these plotlines into individual parts, Jackson propels his narrative forward with brisk parallel editing, drawing heavily on the foundational rules of film language that D.W. Griffith developed in its earliest days. Much like the father of modern cinema, Jackson is both an artist and technician of staggeringly large set pieces, skilfully establishing the geography of fortresses and battlefields in sweeping long shots before cutting between the smaller conflicts within them. The orcs’ assault of Helm’s Deep with siege ladders and catapults is especially reminiscent of the fall of Babylon in Intolerance, while through the chaos Jackson continues tracing the movements of each key player, alleviating the tension with some friendly competition between Legolas and Gimli.
The helicopter shots are another brilliant variation on Jackson’s long shots, circling characters as they traverse New Zealand’s grand mountains and valleys.
Beyond the action as well, Jackson goes on to prove his mastery of epic visuals in the helicopter shots flying over New Zealand’s sprawling mountain ranges, while those static compositions overlooking lush panoramas and ancient cities often look like paintings in their spectacular beauty. Much like Griffith, there is also immense power in his expressive close-ups, framing Arwen like a stone statue beneath her mourning veil and teetering Frodo on the brink of obsessive madness at the Cracks of Doom.
Conversely, Jackson’s framing of faces in close-ups also bring an intimacy to this sprawling epic – a superb staggering of Aragorn and Legolas’ profiles here.An ethereal framing of Arwen beneath her mourning veil, posed like a stone statue.
This balance between the epic and the intimate is the foundation of not only The Lord of the Rings’ tremendous narrative, but also its core belief in the mighty influence of the tiniest creatures. This extends past our four central hobbits, as Gandalf wisely notes that Gollum may play a crucial part in determining the fate of Middle Earth too. This is true on two levels – not only is he incidentally responsible for the destruction of the One Ring at Mount Doom, but to Frodo he also serves as a reminder of the disaster in store should he similarly fall to its temptation. The two opposed voices that split Gollum right down the middle manifest as entirely different beings in Jackson’s editing, alternating the camera position between his left and right sides while they argue, and thereby revealing the quiet, fragile innocence that persists in the mind of this corrupted being. Though Frodo recognises how easily his sympathy for Gollum might be manipulated, he still hangs onto it as a tiny shred of hope for his own redemption.
“I have to believe he can come back.”
Gollum is a vision of Frodo’s future should he fail his mission, and Jackson composes our first glimpse of him beneath this beam of light with eerie beauty.
While Frodo, Sam, and Gollum are continuing their uphill struggle, Tolkien’s ‘David and Goliath’ metaphor also sees Merry ride into the Battle for Middle Earth and deliver a crippling blow to the Witch King, Pip save Faramir from certain death, and both spur the peaceful race of Ents to action through their words alone. Because of them, the forests of Middle Earth rise against the armies of the white wizard Saruman, recalling the primordial imagery of the Battle of Dunsinane from Macbeth. Not content that nature’s vengeance in Shakespeare’s play was merely an illusion though, Tolkien manifests it on a literal level in The Lord of the Rings, pitting the tree-like Ents against the Uruk-hai orcs that Jackson associates with modern forces of technology, industry, and the careless obliteration of life.
Nature itself joins the Free People of Middle Earth and rises up against evil, recalling the primordial imagery of Macbeth’s Battle of Dunsinane.
It takes more than just the fury of the natural world to save Middle Earth from Sauron’s terrible reign though, but also a righteous spiritual grace. Between our heroes of Gandalf, Aragorn, and Frodo, Tolkien essentially splits his Messiah into a trinity, each taking on key characteristics of Christ. After being constantly underestimated as a friend to the meek and lowly, Gandalf is resurrected with new powers, saving Theodon from his brainwashed servitude and vanquishing foes with a dazzling white light. By setting the souls of the suffering free, Aragorn saves Middle Earth from devastation and reigns as its new King, bringing in an age of peace and prosperity. Finally, left to carry the sins of the world around his neck, Frodo offers up the greatest sacrifice of them all, and heads towards what he can only assume will be certain death.
A trinity of Christ figures lead the ensemble of The Lord of the Rings, beginning with Gandalf facing off against a demonic beast, and then followed by his great sacrifice and divine resurrection.Aragorn is the prophesied King, destined to save the souls of the dead and usher in a new era of prosperity.Our final Christ figure is Frodo, bearing the sins of the world around his neck and prepared to give up everything he holds dear.
There is no doubt that Jackson recognises the biblical connotations of the flood washing away Saruman’s forces at Isengard too, or the original sin committed by Isildur that led to the fall of man, though he never underscores this theological symbolism so blatantly. These narrative archetypes largely speak for themselves, emerging organically in Jackson’s storytelling that finds new visual expressions for Tolkien’s mythology, and which continues to build on its classical influences through Howard Shore’s operatic film score. Just as Tolkien drew significant inspiration from the 19th century cycle of epic music dramas Der Ring des Nibelungen, so too does Shore borrow many of Richard Wagner’s classical instrumentations and techniques from that work, developing a rich assortment of leitmotifs that evolve with the narrative.
Saruman poses a mighty threat as he rallies the forces of industry and technology at Isengard, marked as the enemy of the modern world by Tolkien.
The very first of these we hear in the prologue is the Ring theme, played by a thin, double-reeded rhaita that slyly rises and falls along a harmonic minor scale, while Cate Blanchett’s deep, resonant voiceover informs us of its dark history. Because of this uneasy opening, we welcome the shift to the warm, sunny Shire with delight, and embrace the new motif led by a folksy tin whistle that, from this point on, will always remind us of home. Later when Frodo reunites with his uncle Bilbo at Rivendell, it matures with the elegant timbre of a clarinet, before breaking into destitute fragments when a partially corrupted Frodo pushes Sam away late in their quest. When the four hobbits do finally return to the Shire at the end of this colossal journey, the melody is mostly restored in its original form, and yet the flute which now takes over marks a melancholy evolution that keeps these four hobbits from recovering their lost innocence.
Picturesque visuals in the Shire pair sweetly with Howard Shore’s folksy tin whistle motif, which from this point will always remind us of home.
Shore’s music continues to reach even deeper into Middle Earth’s mythology as well, using Tolkien’s constructed languages in choral arrangements as the Fellowship descends into the dwarven Mines of Moria, and as they enter the elven woodland realm of Lothlórien. So too does it serve a crucial role in connecting these characters to their respective cultures and legends, transposing poems from the books into diegetic songs sung by characters in moments of celebration and reflection, most notably in Pippin’s lyrical lament ‘The Edge of Night’. As his soft voices echoes through the cavernous halls of Gondor, Jackson reverberates it across a devastating montage of Faramir and his men riding towards their massacre, intercut with his cowardly father vulgarly ripping into a meal that drips blood-red juices down his chin.
“Home is behind,
The world ahead,
And there are many paths to tread,
Through shadow,
To the edge of night,
Until the stars are all alight,
Mist and shadow,
Cloud and shade,
All shall fade,
All shall fade.”
Jackson’s intercutting between Pippin’s rendition of ‘The Edge of Night’ and Faramir’s brutal defeat at Osgiliath makes for one of the finest pieces of editing in the entire saga, revealing the massacre and tragedy which comes at the hands of cruel leaders like Denethor.
Even on a structural level, Shore integrates the mystical numerology of Middle Earth into his rhythms and notations, particularly using the number 9. There were nine rings created for Men, and nine heroes tasked with carrying the One Ring to Mordor, and so the musical leitmotif used in the themes for both the One Ring and the Fellowship are similarly composed of nine distinct notes. Somewhat poetically, that number also binds together the fates of Sauron and Frodo, with both eventually losing the Ring by having a finger severed and leaving them with only nine.
Nine rings for nine men – this number is sacred in The Lord of the Rings, and so Shore even works it into the music of his prologue and Fellowship theme.
It is in this repetition of history that The Lord of the Rings unfolds its second great subversion of the archetypal quest narrative – even after an immense journey across Middle Earth that has seen many give up their lives, our hero fails his mission. As Frodo turns to Sam atop the Cracks of Doom and chillingly claims the Ring as his own, he strikes a mirror image of Isildur doing the exact same many millennia before, finally falling to its corruptive influence. It would appear that no living entity can destroy Sauron, no matter how large or small they may be. There is only one force powerful enough to defeat an evil this powerful, and that is the evil itself, incidentally turning two of its own corrupted beings against each other in a jealous struggle and thereby sending the Ring plummeting into the lava from which it was forged. Should those who fight for all that is right fail in their mission, Tolkien is resoundingly optimistic that wickedness will collapse under its own unsustainable power.
A mirror image of failure at two separate ages, with both Isildur and Frodo falling to the Ring’s temptation at the crucial moment upon the Cracks of Doom.Gollum encased within the boundaries of the Ring in this superb frame, both their fates entwined in self-destruction.
Like his fellow hobbits, Gollum’s purpose has been found, though there is no path to redemption for him as there is for Frodo. Jackson’s ending to the final film in The Lord of the Rings trilogy has often been accused of long-windedness, though such an expansive story necessitates a conclusion with weight and patience behind it. Even with Sauron defeated, Frodo’s arc is not yet complete, and continues to draw him towards a peaceful resolution in the Undying Lands with Gandalf, Bilbo, and the Elves. How fitting that Tolkien imagined the future of Middle Earth as our present reality where magic has died out and Men have lived on, because at the end of all things, Jackson’s fantasy epic stands as a monumental tribute to their greatest qualities of ambition, endurance, and pure, ingenious creativity.
The Lord of the Rings is currently streaming on Netflix, Prime Video, Binge, and Paramount Plus, can be rented or bought on Apple TV, Amazon Video, or Google Play, and the Blu-ray or DVD can be bought on Amazon.
The downfall of civilisation in Steven Spielberg’s dark vision of the future comes not through machines seeking to displace biological humans, nor does it arrive with an apathetic dismissal of emotions. Not once do we doubt that the Mecha humanoid robot adopted by the Swinton family holds anything less than a sweet, innocent love of his new parents, despite his odd and occasionally dangerous behaviour. In their home of rippled windows and reflective surfaces, his image is distorted into unearthly appearances, driving his surrogate mother, Monica, deeper into her fear and mistrust. As his creator Professor Hobby explains, it is not a question of whether these artificial children can love.
“Isn’t the real conundrum, can you get a human to love them back?”
The philosophical mysteries wrapped up in this single line are vast, drawing this heartrending fable of parents and children back through millennia of human storytelling. “In the beginning, didn’t God create Adam to love him?” the professor asks his colleagues, laying out a biblical framework for Spielberg’s narrative which sees extraordinary creations offer their creator an infinitely selfless love that can never entirely be reciprocated. Like a devoted believer craving a connection to their deity, the lifelike Mecha child David has an unquenchable longing for motherly affection, driving him to the edge of death just so he might finally know what it means to truly be loved, if only for one day.
Even before Spielberg’s futuristic world building expands beyond David’s family home, he warily shoots a young Haley Joel Osment like an alien, refracting his face through this rippled glass window.Underscoring David’s inhumanity by giving him four eyes in this reflection – he poses no physical threat, and yet there through his mother’s perspective, he is an outsider.Superb visual storytelling, keeping David on the outside of the family unit with his face reflected in the family photo.Again, excellent framing from Spielberg that totally isolates David from his uneasy family.
Most of all though, it is the fairy tale of Pinocchio which offers A.I. Artificial Intelligence its overarching narrative structure, as well as an intertextual guide that inspires David’s own journey. If he is the puppet wishing to be a “real boy,” then his companions, the robotic Teddy and fellow Mecha robot Gigolo Joe, fill in the Jiminy Cricket role as his conscience, leaving Professor Hobby as his Geppetto, and the Blue Fairy as a distant, ethereal promise of divine salvation. The Pleasure Island of Spielberg’s version is not a carnival that indulges the whims of naughty boys, but a Flesh Fair where humans express a violent, existential anger at their insignificance in a modern world by torturing and mutilating A.I. robots.
The Pinocchio allegory is right there in the text, motivating David to become a “real boy” – though with this sci-fi twist, we are also being led to question what exactly makes a real human.A terrifyingly violent set piece at the Flesh Fair, exposing the worst of humanity’s vices like Pleasure Island from Pinocchio. A gratuitous feast for the senses with the flashing lights and violent entertainment.
The conservative undertones to the Flesh Fair’s slogan “A Celebration of Life” are readily apparent in Spielberg’s critique of society’s regressive nostalgia, making it not in the least bit surprising that A.I. Artificial Intelligence was originally going to be directed by Stanley Kubrick. There may be no filmmaker with a greater distaste for humanity than the one whose emotional coldness lifted 2001: A Space Odyssey to transcendent heights, and who cast misanthropic aspersions on arbitrary historical traditions in Barry Lyndon. Humanity is overrated, he believed, and so it easy to see how cleanly this film’s admiration of the inhuman would have fit into his broader filmography.
Believing that there was no child actor good enough for its lead role though, and realising that the technology of the day was not yet advanced enough to create a computer-generated version of him, Kubrick passed the story along to Spielberg. Without seeing Kubrick’s finalised vision, it is impossible to assess whether it would have been greater than Spielberg’s or not, but it is tough to conceive it being so emotionally affecting.
Spielberg brings a much warmer touch to this tale than Kubrick would have, centring the sweet love a child has for his mother with gentle grace. This doesn’t make it better or worse than what we might have gotten otherwise – but it is honest to Spielberg’s artistic inclinations.
Of course, a large part of this has to do with Spielberg casting humans as his lead actors, rather than rendering them in CGI as Kubrick originally intended. Haley Joel Osment indeed delivers that child performance that Kubrick believed was impossible, exploring the existential depths of this artificial child coming to terms with a universe that created him and then left him to fend for himself. There is a particular poignancy in his performance as we edge towards the final act, where David discovers an entire factory of other Mecha products identical to his own design and recognises his true insignificance to his own creator. As he peers through the empty eye holes of a mask bearing resemblance to his own face, Spielberg distils his identity crisis down to a single, eerie image, revealing the heart and mind of a “real boy” trapped in the body of a machine.
Meanwhile, Jude Law’s turn as A.I. male prostitute Gigolo Joe offers David a warm camaraderie that is scarce to be found anywhere else, moving in energetic, dancelike movements inspired by Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. Through both his and Osment’s performances, we find an expressive, vivid humanity in the film that has been lost in the biological humanoids around them.
David is just one of many identical models, bringing questions of identity and individuality into the mix as he peers through a mask of his own face.Jude Law is light on his feet as Gigolo Joe, basing his movements on Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly’s dancing. There is more humanity to be found in this Mecha robot than most other humans in this film.
Perhaps this is why David’s wish to be human is such a dauntingly impossible request when he finally meets his maker, given that source of his troubles lies not in his identity, but in everyone else. Human love naturally struggles to survive in a dystopian world of widespread moral corruption, and so the group of artificial outsiders who consistently outperform their natural counterparts become the perfect scapegoats. The settings that David must contend with are daunting in their tactile designs, setting an artistic challenge for Spielberg that plays to his strengths as a world builder and craftsman of powerful imagery. The cold blue lighting and isolating compositions of the first act set in the Swinton family home are carefully curated, but A.I. Artificial Intelligence truly lifts off when David is abruptly thrust into unfamiliar environments, where giant, glowing moons float through forests and sunken carnival attractions dwell in New York’s flooded depths.
With the iconic shot from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Spielberg clearly relishes his giant moon shots – total awe at the universe beyond Earth.A flooded New York City reveals another dystopian angle to this future society. A great failure on humanity’s part that has been totally abandoned.
Most of all though, it is in the populated urban centres of Rouge City where Spielberg is at the top of his visual game, with cinematographer Janusz Kamiński drawing heavy inspiration from Blade Runner both thematically and aesthetically. The light pollution emitted by the coloured neon signs and buildings that line the dingy urban streets is blinding, projecting flashy holograms into the night sky like a ceiling to keep out the darkness. Spielberg weaves a glossy palette of red, blue, purple, and black through the architecture and costumes of these environments, while the Flesh Fair establishes a grittier aesthetic in a stadium illuminated by bright roving spotlights and flashing bulbs. Every detail captured by Spielberg’s camera is dynamic and bursting with life, telling the story of a culture entangled in a moral predicament of grand proportions, unable to reconcile its humanity with its artificial creations.
Spielberg draws a great deal of inspiration from Blade Runner. Not just in the question of identity and being, but in the magnificent production design of crowded urban spaces and futurist architecture.
Spielberg does not shy away from the air of fated devastation that hangs over this civilisation either, eventually embracing visions of a future where humans have died out. A.I. Artificial Intelligence could have very well ended on a demoralising downbeat as David finds himself locked in an eternity of constant, unfulfilled wishes, and yet Spielberg’s gracious leap forward two thousand years into the future alleviates some of that misery for a more bittersweet conclusion. The evolution of Mecha has brought about a more advanced race of beings that are kinder and more peaceful than humans ever were. They claim that they are unable to grant his wish, and yet the validation he seeks is nevertheless fulfilled through their generous gift – one last day with his mother, free from any worldly distractions.
Those two thousand years may have vanished in the blank of an eye for David, and yet these hours spent experiencing true, maternal love become “the everlasting moment he had been waiting for,” seeming to stretch on forever. Before they both drift off into a sleep neither will wake from, Spielberg tugs on the heartstrings one last time, recognising the compassionate acceptance that this child has found in his mother’s arms. It is one thing to have the emotional capacity to love another person, he concludes, and yet only by feeling the warmth of that equal, unconditional love in return can any living being experience the full joy of being human.
Spielberg continues his narrative thousands of years into the future, revealing a total dilapidation in his enormous production design that also houses one last hope for David.
A.I. Artificial Intelligence is currently streaming on Stan and Binge, and is available to rent or buy on Apple TV and Amazon Video.
Though often described as a sequel to Scenes from a Marriage, Saraband is not so much an interrogation of that famous relationship which saw divorce rates rise across Sweden as it is an observation of the imprint it has left on those younger generations left to carry its legacy. There are a couple of fresh faces present here in Börje Ahlstedt and Julia Dufvenius, while for Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson this film marks the end of an era. Not only is it their final collaboration with Ingmar Bergman, but for the celebrated Swedish director it is also his last work before he passed away in 2007, and a notable return to form after many years of creating less-than-admirable television movies.
Saraband may not be the first time he has contemplated regrets of old age, though compared to the pensive meditations of Wild Strawberries and Autumn Sonata, this screenplay is far more grounded in Bergman’s firsthand experience of the matter. Save for a few minor dreams and flashbacks, these narrative diversions are excised altogether, and instead this story of reunited ex-lovers is delivered through a series of ten chapters not unlike the six parts of Scenes from a Marriage.
Liv Ullmann breaks the fourth wall in the prologue and epilogue, pouring over a table of photographs capturing pieces of Marianne’s life.
The result is a film that takes the form of a written memoir, framing an aged Marianne as our first-person narrator who pours over photographs of her life, and whose direct addresses to the camera bookend the narrative in a prologue and epilogue. Her absence from so many chapters is not an oversight on Bergman’s part. Each scene in this chamber drama is purposefully written as a two-hander, crafting rich dynamics from all the possible pairings between our four central characters – Marianne, Johan, his estranged son Henrik, and his freedom-seeking granddaughter Karin. Among them, Marianne appears to be the only one who is most content with herself, having put her psychological demons evident in Scenes from a Marriage to rest many years ago. She does not seek to become an active part of Johan’s family drama, but instead she carries a largely observational and counselling presence, offering warm wisdom to those willing to listen.
Warm burgundy colours in the costume and production design when Marianne and Johan reunite after many years. Saraband’s main drama is not about them – they are at peace with their divorce.Contrary to what one might have assumed from Bergman’s last few projects, he has not lost his touch with these intimate close-ups. Neither has he apparently lost his penchant for disturbing relationship dynamics with Henrik’s sexual abuse of his daughter.
For an elderly Johan staring down the end of his life, Marianne’s impromptu visit couldn’t be timelier in helping him make peace with his own psychological troubles. It is somewhat surprising how little animosity there is between them, especially given how firmly he holds onto old grudges against Henrik which consequently left a broken family in their wake. In the absence of his alienated father and deceased wife Anna, Henrik has made the unsettling decision to attempt filling every role in his daughter’s life, thus not only positioning himself as her cello tutor, but also, quite disturbingly, as her lover.
It’s not quite The Seventh Seal or Winter Light, but there is an austere beauty to Bergman’s wide shots and tangential contemplations of religion.
The messiness of human entanglements has long been at the centre of Bergman’s writing, and sixty years after his early melodramas in the 1940s he is quite astonishingly still finding new angles on the jealousy and insecurity that hides within our most intimate relationships. Much like Johan and Marianne’s arguments in Scenes from a Marriage, Henrik’s seething expressions of acrid resentment reveal far more about his own spiteful soul than the target of his derision, taking perverted pleasure in the suffering he mentally projects on his father.
“I hate him in all possible dimensions of the word. I hate him so much, I would like to see him die from a horrible illness. I’d visit him every day, just to witness his torment.”
Ironically enough, it isn’t too hard to imagine Karin a few years down the track holding similar feelings towards the man who speaks these words. Bergman struggles to develop a strong visual aesthetic in Saraband, though the strained relationship between Henrik and Karin becomes abundantly clear in his trademark composition of their parallel faces lying horizontal in bed, as he desperately begs her to audition for a nearby music conservatory so she can stay close by his side.
That horizontal blocking of parallel faces appearing for the last time in Bergman’s filmography, and this time he hangs on the shot as the camera drifts between close-ups of both.
It isn’t until after speaking with Johan and Marianne individually that Karin finds the courage to set out on a new path, following her friend to Hamburg to perform in an orchestra, and thereby rebelling against her father’s isolative preference for her to pursue a career as a solo cellist. There is a beautiful synchronicity between this arc and the accompanying music too, ringing out the lonely lament of a single cello throughout much of the film, before growing into a full orchestral symphony as Karin envisions a future of her own choosing. Bergman is not a director who typically makes extensive use of film scores, though certainly his love of classical music has persisted through his work ever since 1950’s To Joy, elegantly expressing his characters’ deepest yearnings.
One of the very few breaks from reality in Saraband, escaping into this white void in Karin’s mind as she plays the cello, the whole world opening up to her.
Perhaps the most profound of all these longings though is for a figure who is almost completely absent in Saraband, represented only in the framed photographs that adorn Johan, Henrik, Karin, and even Marianne’s personal spaces. The grace that Anna brought to their lives is sorely missed, and it is only thanks to her that Karin ever really knew what it meant to feel the kind, unselfish love of a parent. Through Anna, Henrik was made fully aware of his failings as a father, and perhaps he might have even been able to fix them had she not passed away. As it is though, all she was able to leave him was a letter written shortly before her death, professing her love yet warning him against further wounding his relationship with Karin.
Anna is the fifth primary character, and yet is physically absent from Saraband having passed away long ago. She continues to leave a mark on those left behind though, each of them keeping a framed black-and-white photo close in their homes.
Unlike virtually everyone else in this ensemble though, Henrik cannot simply let go of those who are ready to move on without him. His failed suicide attempt after Karin’s departure for Berlin is the bleak conclusion to his story, though Bergman decides to sit a little longer with those two characters whose richness and authenticity secured his place in popular culture thirty years prior. As an anxious Johan finds comfort in Marianne’s arms after a night of restless sleep, the two bear their naked bodies to each other for the first time in decades, finding an intimate, humbling honesty that cuts through the existential terror of old age. In the last moments of Bergman’s last film, there are no vicious verbal attacks or extreme acts of spiritual desecration to be found. Much like Marianne, Bergman too finds peace in the act of introspective reminiscence, allowing him to finally appreciate the pure bond between lovers, parents, and children that transcends all other worldly distractions.
A raw, naked union of bodies under the sheets, these ex-lovers finding comfort in each other’s arms and accepting old age together.
For all the times that Charlie Kaufman’s characters cryptically declare that “The end is built into the beginning” in Synecdoche, New York, it wouldn’t be quite right to describe the film’s structure as circular. From the outside it looks far more like a mobius strip, forcing Philip Seymour Hoffman’s pitiful theatre director along paths that invert, double back on themselves, twist inside-out, and lead him back to the lonely, feeble life he has been trying to escape.
If anyone in this absurd universe has any power at all, then it is simply over the journey they will take to their inevitable grave. “It’s a big decision how one prefers to die,” one real estate agent glibly considers while selling a burning house destined to kill its buyer a few decades later, and indeed it may be the only decision that really matter. For Caden Cotard though, that is not enough. To create a piece of theatre that transcends life itself is to effectively become a self-autonomous god of one’s own artificial world, governing the rules of time and fate, and yet this construct is entirely hollow. Death is approaching, hastening with each passing day, and still he remains ignorant to what he believes is little more than a vague concept to be explored through actors and scripts. Kaufman’s mobius strip leads Caden everywhere he desires, only to remind him that he has always been the same sad, mortal being he was at the outset.
Kaufman’s world in Synecdoche, New York is his most absurd to date, shedding the burden of grounding it in any sort of reality with the house that is permanently on fire.
It isn’t that Kaufman had been particularly limited by his career as a screenwriter up to this point, but when compared to films like Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind it is clear to see just how much he had been itching to disengage his high-concept visions from any familiar reality. The formal ambition on display in Synecdoche, New York’s enormous, postmodern allegory for man’s self-obsessed ego is equal parts staggering and confounding, transporting us into a bizarre Kafkaesque reality that only gradually reveals its underlying insanity. Even in the opening moments depicting a seemingly ordinary morning in Caden’s family home, Kaufman applies an incredible attention to detail whenever the date is mentioned in the mail, newspaper, television, radio, or even on an expired milk bottle, seeing days invisibly slip by despite there being no breaks in the action. For now, Caden’s ignorance to the passage of time is relatively harmless, and yet its relentless acceleration will soon see his six-year-old daughter grow into a teenager in what feels like a few weeks, and years vanish overnight.
Time slips by seamlessly until we find Caden’s daughter grown up – an incredible formal stroke from Kaufman.
Maybe this is why he decides to create a simulacrum of reality within his untitled piece of theatre, funded by the grant he received for his acclaimed staging of Death of a Salesman. Time moves according to his will in this world that has been built entirely around him, allowing him to relive and dissect his past through actors who play out previous real-life scenes verbatim, while he starts and stops the action at his own whim. On one level, he is simply doing this to prove and glorify his intellect, but on another it is a narcissistic self-flagellation, viciously eviscerating himself on a public stage for the sake of his own ego.
“I will have someone play me to delve into the murky, cowardly depths of my lonely, fucked-up being. And he’ll get notes too, and those notes will correspond to the notes I truly receive every day from my god!”
Actors playing actors – Kaufman’s metafiction is keenly self-aware and self-critical.
Not that others need his artistic expression to see his flaws for what they are. If anything, he remains blindly ignorant to those insecurities that challenge his masculinity, refusing to confront his repressed homosexuality even as it is noted by multiple other characters, and convincing himself that his psychosomatic illnesses are real. Within the safety of the theatre, he can pick and choose which parts of himself are reflected in his art, making for some amusingly ironic encounters when he forces the self-realisation he is running from on his cast.
“Try to keep in mind that a young person playing Willie Loman thinks he’s only pretending to be at the end of a life full of despair. But the tragedy is that we know that you, the young actor, will end up in this very place of desolation.”
The self-awareness of Synecdoche, New York though continues to go far beyond Caden’s own consciousness – this entire project essentially boils down to Kaufman’s bitter confession of his own creative process, wrestling with his character flaws to create something honest at the expense of others’ time, patience, and sanity. This is nothing new for him, seeing as how he quite literally inserted himself as a character into Adaptation a few years prior, but of all his fictional self-representations Caden cuts the deepest. Part of this has to do with the remarkable formal complexity of his creation, completely blurring the line between reality and fiction as his actors play out seemingly genuine interactions in place of their real-life counterparts, though of course credit must also be given to Hoffman’s tortured, anxiety-ridden performance. Even within the context of his tremendous career, his portrayal of Kaufman’s self-loathing surrogate showcases some of his greatest acting, physically ageing into the body of an old man even as his mind remains stubbornly fixated on his vision of a world preserved in art.
Adele’s art is the formal inverse of Caden’s, shrinking smaller and letting viewers lean in, as his grows larger and dwarfs its own creator.
Kaufman’s scathing critique of an artist’s psychology though does not cast as wide a net with its cynical aspersions as one might expect, as while Caden’s sets of streets and buildings continue to sprawl out through his enormous warehouse, his ex-wife’s paintings progressively shrink in size. These creations are every bit the inverse of Caden’s play – tiny, delicate expressions of beauty and humility, not seeking to claim a large plot of real estate in this crowded world, but rather letting its spectators lean in with their magnifying glasses and become active participants in their aesthetic appreciation. This is far more than one could say about Caden’s play, which seems to exist in a permanent state of writing and rehearsal, and refuses to engage with any potential audiences. As far as he is concerned, this work of art serves no one but himself, representing his bloated ego in the expansion of post-it notes across tables and sprawling urban infrastructure through his New York City replica.
One of the few great compositions of the film, sprawling post-it notes across tables in an image of Caden’s expanding ego.
If there is anything that distinguishes Synecdoche, New York as the product of a screenwriter making their foray into film direction, then it is the fact that Kaufman’s achievement primarily lies in the intelligent formal construction of such an intricately absurd meta-reality, while neglecting the development of any binding aesthetic. Unlike his later work in I’m Thinking of Ending Things, his visual invention here never quite matches the peculiar world he has created until its final scenes, where Caden shrinks against a giant, grey city, and the limits of his ambition are confined under an industrial ceiling where one might expect to find a boundless sky.
A giant replica of New York City built within the confines of Caden’s warehouse, forever expanding yet limited by the artificial ceiling in place of a sky.
Decades continue to slip by in this space and Caden becomes an old man, yet it still barely matters to him that the real world outside has crumbled into apocalyptic dystopia, even as its corruptive influences infiltrate the dreary fantasy he has made his home. As one of its few remaining survivors, he wanders its bleak urban wasteland littered with burning cars and dead bodies, still delving layers deeper into his lonely existence – not as a vain, power-hungry director, but as an actor to be manipulated by another director superseding him. More specifically, he takes on the role of Ellen, his daughter’s custodian, while the actress who played her becomes his god, speaking directly into his mind. For what seems like the first time in Synecdoche, New York, Caden’s inner monologue is not just filled with regret for his own wasted time, but empathy for the misery of others.
“What was once before you – an exciting, mysterious future – is now behind you. Lived, understood, disappointing. You realize you are not special. You have struggled into existence, and are now slipping silently out of it. This is everyone’s experience. Every single one. The specifics hardly matter. Everyone’s everyone. So you are Adele, Hazel, Claire, Olive. You are Ellen. All her meagre sadnesses are yours. All her loneliness. The grey, straw-like hair, her red raw hands. It’s yours. It is time for you to understand this.”
Caden becomes a ghost wandering the empty shell of his city, with the poetic voice of his director revealing the despair of his lonely, selfish existence.
Caden’s anguish is not unique, and never has been. His is the story of every human to have ever lived, following a path back to the state of non-existence which preceded their birth, and yet for some arrogant reason he has convinced himself that he is the orchestrator of his own fate. In his final seconds, as he considers what might as well be the hundredth potential title for his play, the voice of his indifferent god who continues to direct him right to the end cuts him off with a short, sharp instruction. There is little more to be said about his sad, solitary existence when that word is uttered, finally dooming him to the obscurity that he spent his entire life running from.
“Die.”
Synecdoche, New York is currently available to rent or buy on Google Play and YouTube.
The loss of innocence is no small tragedy in the final instalment of Park Chan-wook’s thematic Vengeance trilogy. Whether it is eroded over time as it is for ex-convict Lee Geum-ja, or instantly annihilated as we see in her old mentor’s sadistic murders of children, its erasure is a permanent fixture that no amount of retribution can restore. Equally though, the alternative of letting those who have perpetuated such soul-destroying misery go unpunished offers no real resolution either, denying any sort of catharsis to their victims. Geum-ja has many complex reasons driving her mission to track down serial kidnapper and killer Mr. Baek, but buried deep within all of them is a corrosive melancholia, represented here not through the cool, passive hues of so many other Park films, but rather by burning crimsons that stain her journey with raw, wounded anger.
Park’s formal dedication to setting these blood red tones against clean whites in his mise-en-scene emphasises this severity even further, greeting Geum-ja with its shocking visual contrast when she is granted an early prison release. Outside those concrete walls, a group of Christian church singers dressed in Santa outfits offer her a block of tofu, traditionally symbolic of one’s redemptive decision to become pure like the snow that falls lightly on their shoulders. Her cold rejection of their proposed salvation brusquely indicates the path she has chosen. She is not looking to restore her long-lost innocence, but to turn her cruelty against the man who taught it to her, applying a striking red eyeshadow to her face as she takes on the mantle that she has spent thirteen years in prison crafting – Lady Vengeance.
Rejecting the symbolic tofu of purity and innocence from the outset – redemption is the last thing on Geum-ja’s mind.Park’s films are not without good doses of humour, introducing the red and white colour palette through the group of singing Santas as Geum-ja exits prison.The red eyeshadow is a superb design choice, marking Geum-ja with the angry colour palette that surrounds her.
As dogged as Geum-ja is in her furious efforts to hunt down Mr. Baek, there is also an elegant restraint to her navigation of such personal traumas, captured in Lee Young-ae’s sublimely balanced performance that sits somewhere between angelic and diabolic. So too does it extend to Choi Seung-hyun’s baroque score of strings and harpsichord, relentlessly pulsing along to steady, staccato rhythms that only barely hide a muted fury and sorrow.
For a long time, the source of this anguish seems mysteriously distant, as Park chooses to hide the face of the man responsible like a painfully repressed memory. Through his narrative of tightly interwoven flashbacks, it often feels as if we are seeking some reason behind his cruelty and exploitation, especially given how effortlessly it hides behind shallow displays of kindness. When Geum-ja falls pregnant at the age of 20, Mr. Baek is the first person she goes to for support, falling so much under his spell that she readily supports his kidnapping racket and takes the fall for his ‘accidental’ killing of a young boy. Within this morbid plot lies an even darker truth though – this teacher specifically targets children at the schools he works at, satiating his sadistic hatred through torture and murder. Even before we meet him directly, Mr. Baek is thoroughly built up as one of Park’s most monstrous characters, so when he is revealed as a dumpy, bespectacled man, Lady Vengeance forces us into a chilling recognition of evil’s unassuming façade.
Maybe the most despicable character of any Park film, disguised as a small, dumpy, unassuming school teacher.
If such burning hatred exists within a man as seemingly gentle as Mr. Baek, then it stands to reason that his groomed pupil is equally capable of extraordinary violence despite her youthful beauty. It is a perversion of everything we are led to believe about good and evil, even inciting a media storm that cannot reconcile the two extremes in a single person when she initially confesses to Mr. Baek’s crimes. Even beyond this dichotomy drawn through Park’s red-and-white colour palette, it also manifests in the formal relation between his grotesque subject matter and the stylish grace with which he navigates it, fluidly transitioning into flashbacks with graphic match cuts and floating the camera through scenes of brutal torture. Geum-ja cannot be solely defined by either her purity or retributive anger, but much like an avenging angel sent to deliver uncompromising, righteous justice, she is an indivisible composite of both.
Park’s visual style is elegant in its lighting, framing, colour, and camera movement, even as it runs up against its disturbing subject matter.
It is not just the thirteen years lost in prison while her daughter Jenny was growing up that she mourns, but the guilt of knowing she is responsible for her abandonment issues plagues her as well. It takes a huge amount of humility then on her part to realise that despite all this, her suffering may be the least of all Mr. Baek’s surviving victims. While she can at least accept some responsibility for it, the parents of the children he killed spend every day wrestling with the incomprehensibility and randomness of their tragedy. This revenge mission belongs not just to her, but to a whole community of mothers and fathers, now being given the ultimate decision of how to deal with the monster of their nightmares.
Split screens between Geum-ja and her daughter in the letter scene, while Park keeps formally tying in that red colour scheme.
What are any of them to take from this violent reprisal though? Going off Park’s previous film Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, one might almost expect their bloodthirst to be judged with more scepticism that they are solving anything at all by perpetuating further suffering. He doesn’t entirely reject that idea here, but there is at least some therapeutic salvation in these characters deliberating the futility of their actions – no amount of vigilante justice will ever return their children. Still, they line up outside the classroom that Geum-ja has tied Mr. Baek up inside all the same, taking turns to inflict physical representations of their emotional agony on him, and confront the pitiful mortality of its source. Evil is not some invisible, demonic force, they discover, but entirely human, as regrettably intrinsic to our being as the innocence it destroys.
Creative framing and colouring as Park positions us beneath the blood-drenched plastic sheet, gazing up at Geum-ja.
Then again, perhaps there is also the potential for it to serve a more protective purpose as well. Only when Geum-ja’s innocence is gone does she appreciate its real value, and further seek to preserve it in her daughter before the psychological damage she has done becomes irreversible. As she stands with Jenny on a snowy street, she is once again gifted the symbolic tofu in the form of a white cake, offering a purification of her soul. This time, she does not brush it off, but given the heaviness of her sins, neither can she accept it. Instead, all she can do is bury her face in its soft layers, longing for the redemption that her vindictive mission has failed to deliver, despite it playing out exactly as she intended. For Geum-ja, there is no total victory in the battle between purity and corruption. Just a prolonged battle to protect one by vengefully enacting the other.
Geum-ja’s vengeance comes to an end, wiping off the red eyeshadow in this gorgeous bathroom set.Still unable to accept the symbolic tofu, Geum-ja is simply left to bury her face in its soft layers – redemption is still out of reach, even as she longs for it.
Lady Vengeance is not currently streaming in Australia.
Given that the title Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance could refer to either one of its two main characters, the challenge it poses is particularly fraught with self-contradictions. To have sympathy for the deaf-mute factory worker Ryu is to recognise the desperate circumstances he has found himself in with a group of dishonest black-market organ dealers, driving him to raise money for his sister’s kidney transplant by taking take a young girl hostage. Even if his actions are cruel, his motivations are reasonable, though such nuances are irrelevant to wealthy business owner Park Dong-jin. After all, it is his daughter who has been targeted, and now he too is set on a path of retribution against her kidnapper.
Expressing sympathy for both men is a tricky balance to strike, but it is one which Park Chan-wook achieves by transmuting it into a new feeling – pity. Of all the films in his Vengeance trilogy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance may be the purest distillation of his nihilistic ethos, recognising humanity’s innate yet self-destructive need for violent anger in its formal mirroring between two angry, wounded men at odds with each other.
One could draw parallels between Park and his Austrian contemporary Michael Haneke in their icy, detached depictions of violence, often sitting in remote wide shots that distance us from both aggrieved tormentors and victims, yet there is a very clear division in their aesthetics. Where Haneke is rigorously committed to the humourless minimalism of such acts, Park injects them with a wry sardonicism, relishing the elegant grotesqueness of a white shirt slowly turning red from attempted seppuku, or the clouds of blood left behind a body being pulled through running water.
Death and violence may have never looked more beautiful as it does in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, with Park always finding the most unconventional compositions to disturb and entrance us.
The riverbank set piece we return to multiple times might even be interpreted as a sacrificial altar of sorts given that it hosts much of the film’s body count. If there is any god being served here though, then maybe it is our own human desire to see suffering dealt out as a form of justice. In that sense, Park’s recurring overhead shots serve a brilliant formal purpose in placing us above these characters, like divine witnesses to the dramatic irony playing out across Ryu and Dong-jin’s parallel plotlines. The gentle stream of water, the loose stones, and the curved rock platforms of the river look breathtaking from these high angles, compelling us to revel in the perverse beauty of cold, dead bodies returning to nature.
Park returns to these overhead shots at the riverbed multiple times like a gods-eye view – but where is the god in this senseless world?Park chooses his set pieces well, returning to this river multiple times as the site for murders, accidental deaths, and burials, turning it into a sacrificial altar of sorts.
Through this godlike, omniscient perspective, Park expands the world of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance to a magnificent extent. While Dong-jin comes from the prestigious upper end of Korean society, Ryu is confined to a small, messy apartment that shares a wall with four other young men, denying any of them the right to privacy. At some points the shifting of Park’s camera between various points-of-view underscores a dark dramatic irony, positioning us with the neighbours who masturbate to what they interpret as screams of pleasure, before physically crossing the barrier to show Ryu’s sister crying in pain from her kidney infection. Later, Park formally recalls this moment in reverse when Dong-jin presses his ear against the wall to hear what he believes is an investigator speaking to neighbours, while the camera dollies to the other side and reveals the source as a radio news report.
Silhouettes of Ryu ascending the steps with the black-market organ dealers to the site of his betrayal, cloaked in silhouette,
Under Park’s idiosyncratic direction, such keen visual storytelling is precisely choreographed and thrillingly executed, eschewing dialogue for large stretches of time while we cut between this pair of lone wolves doggedly hunting down their prey. His editing and camera movements are measured as this narrative unfolds to the sounds of the Uhuhboo Project’s experimental score, but virtually every shot he lands on possesses its own visual eccentricity too in wide-angle lenses, unconventional framing, and one of the greatest modern uses of deep focus photography.
Deep focus and wide-angle lenses allow for shots like these, noting the torturer in the background and his victim dominating the right third of the foreground.Upside-down and canted angles shot through stairwells – Park is endlessly creative with his shot choices.
Perhaps the most astoundingly rigorous of all Park’s creative choices though is the palette of murky greens that this morally tainted culture is so steeped in. This is a level of world building akin to Krzysztof Kieslowski, deeply engaged with the metaphysical connections between strangers united within common circumstances, and tonally expressed in a set of formally binding aesthetics. Here, green tones light up Ryu’s dyed hair like a mint-coloured beacon and verdantly illuminate his shabby apartment, while on Dong-jin’s side they accompany him through up-class urban environments and into the crematory where he mournfully bids farewell to his daughter. While we suffer one gut punch after another with these characters and watch them fall into retaliatory anger, Park’s cool tones and sustained pacing maintain a calm, chilly composure.
Rigorous attention to detail – green is the major visual motif Park keeps returning to all throughout his film, binding his parallel plot lines together within a murky aesthetic before finally bringing them together.
It is the perfect stylistic match for the film’s visceral, pessimistic humour too, predominantly keeping us at a distance while intermittently making us flinch. For what is supposedly a godless universe, it certainly enjoys rubbing each character’s reckless mistakes in their faces, opening a spot for Ryu’s sister on the hospital waitlist almost immediately after he loses his money to the black-market, and later incidentally landing him next to the sheet-covered corpse of his girlfriend, Yeong-me, on an elevator. It isn’t that he and Dong-jin are ineffective in accomplishing their quests for revenge, but both are victims of their own short-sightedness, refusing to see the long-term consequences of their actions. Especially for Dong-jin, the warning of his comeuppance is right there in front of him when a half-dead Yeong-me begs for mercy.
“If anything happens to me, my organisation is a terrorist group. They’ll kill you. For sure. I gave them your picture. If you want to live, just leave me. This is for your sake.”
This is also the threat which haunts him in the final scene after his vicious murder of Ryu at the river, materialising in a daunting composition of four resolute faces staggered into the background, knowingly staring at him. Retribution is not a solution in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, but an endless chain of victims seeking mutually assured destruction, foolish enough to believe that they might escape the destinies they have chosen. Then again, maybe we can find some pity for these poor creatures governed by their basic human instincts, futilely hoping that it might satiate their innate, bloodthirsty hunger for justice.
A superb blocking of faces as Dong-jin faces his comeuppance – every quest for revenge is a link in an infinite chain, and this is his part of it coming to an end.
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is not currently streaming in Australia.
