Deadly Hymns

It took me years after watching Fallen starring Denzel Washington to listen to The Rolling Stones' "Time Is On My Side" without my blood curdling. Last night we watched Night of the Hunter, and it's going to be a long time before I hear "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" the same way again. *shudder* Have you had any songs take on alternative, eerie meanings for you in similar ways?

The Science of Sleep

How many movies do we actually end up rewatching? There are movies I think are utter masterpieces I've seen only once. Movies I truly love, I've probably only seen between two and four times. It's really only the lighter fare (Super Troopers, Dazed and Confused, The Warriors, etc.) that I've given the once every 4-6 week treatment to, and then for finite periods of time. No matter how much you might have changed since your last viewing, sometimes, there just doesn't seem to be a point to spending another two hours immersed in a world you've already visited.

SM hadn't seen Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep before, so when it was playing at the Gene Siskel Film Center last week, we decided to take advantage. I adore Michel Gondry's imagination and visual creations, but it hadn't been one of the movies I'd really put a lot of thought into rewatching. The first and last time I'd seen it, I'd come away both defensive and disappointed. Gondry's music videos and general DIY arts approach to filmmaking has been influential for me ever since I saw the White Stripes' "Fell in Love with a Girl video" in 2001. I was floored when Eternal Sunshine came out in 2004, and bought the Criterion Collection of his short videos as soon as I could. Needless to say, with his body of work in mind combined with my intense crush on star Gael Garcia Bernal, expectations were high when Science of Sleep came out in 2006. Instead of having those expectations met, however, I left the theater unable to explain what I'd just seen. I thought it was muddled and disorganized in spite of its incredible set design and animation techniques, which I'd seen as its only redeeming element. I answered my doubts with a dismissive familiarity with Gondry's work: "what else did I really expect? With such a creative mind as his, it's hard to have so many ideas, such an expansive vision, and keep it cohesive and in check." I went into this second viewing excited to enter his world again, but didn't expect much from the movie itself.

This time, I was truly impressed. Instead of fighting through my own expectations, I was able to watch the film with a much more discerning eye. There was so much reality going on just under the surface that did a lot to support the whole premise, so many details I hadn't caught before that make each choice much more intentional than I had given it credit for.

The film opens with French-Mexican Stephane Miroux (Bernal) moving to Paris to be with his mother after his father dies of cancer in Mexico. He moves into his childhood room in his mother's former apartment in a building she owns, and starts a job she sets up for him. He is a creative type and likes to draw, invent, and make things with his hands, a hobby he has had since he was a child (he turns off the light switch from his bed with an elaborate pulley system attached to a mallet). The job turns out to be much less fulfilling than he'd expected, and he is continually stymied by his inadequate French. Things quickly get a lot more interesting, though, when he meets his neighbor, Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), from across the hall as she's moving in. She originally thinks he is part of the moving crew when he ends up helping (and hurting) her moving efforts and getting himself hurt in the process, and invites him in to have her attractive friend, Zoe, tend his wound. While Stephanie is attracted to him, he is initially attracted to Zoe, creating a bit of a triangle. After he gets to know Stephanie a bit more and sees her creative pursuits, though, he begins to change his mind.

The variable that takes the movie on a loop is the surrealistic elements of the film. From the beginning, we are treated to the view from inside Stephane's head. In his mind he has his own television show, complete with cardboard sets, on which he is the host, cooking up the ingredients of his day into dreamy concoctions that lead to DIY-style fantasy sequences about his father and his new surroundings as he sleeps. As the film progresses, though, those fantasies blend with reality to calamitous results. Just as things are getting friendly with Stephanie, he nakedly sleepwalks across the hall and slips a dream-written note under her door, in which he spouts a lot of nonsense but manages to close with asking for Zoe's number. The crux of the ensuing misunderstanding is here, but the viewer doesn't realize it yet: unbeknownst to Stephane, Stephanie read the note before he realized his mistake and retrieved it from under her door. As he falls for Stephanie and tries to spend more time with her, we realize that she saw the note as a sign that he's not interested in her and that they are just friends, so she rebuffs his advances. Stephane's dreamworld continues to unknowingly muddle his reality, and he becomes more and more confused and heartbroken as the movie unfolds, ultimately spoiling the chance he does get with Stephanie because he is so wrapped up in his own head.

What I hadn't realized before is how much goes into muddling the viewer's sense of reality right along with Stephane's. Often in surrealistic films, the viewer is above it all, aware of what is real and what isn't, even if the characters aren't. This is usually done by spending close to equal amount of time in both the real and fantastical world. In The Science of Sleep, we know that Stephane is spending too much time in his dreamworld, but we don't really realize how much time we're not spending in the real world either. Only snatches of the real world are visible, and noticing them the second time around really grounded the movie for me and put Stephane's detachment from reality in perspective. We see Stephanie's setup to getting angry and frustrated in small snatches that only amount to a few minutes of screen time. We see Stephane's coworkers annoyed that he hasn't been reliable at work for another few measly minutes sprinkled throughout. We see Stephane's mother argue with her boyfriend for only a few seconds before she ends up moving back into the apartment she shared with her son long ago. These glimpses are enough reality on second viewing to make Stephane's situation bigger than he is, and it gives the film more depth.

Another layer of complexity I hadn't noticed before was language. The first time I saw the film, I attributed the muddled dialogue to English being Gondry's second language. Now I see that the distinctive ESL flavor to the script underscores Stephane's state of mind, both in his life as a transplant from Mexico who recently lost his father, and from his perch between reality and his dreamworld. Throughout the film he pushes the boundaries of his French with everyone he meets and is forced to settle for their common second language, English. Even with his mother, he can understand her French, but he would much prefer to express himself to her in English. In his conversations with Stephanie, both of them take thought to find the right English words to express the inner monologues that no doubt take place in their own first languages. (It seemed as if the actors improvised a lot of their conversation, which expertly added to this effect.) Stephane's limitations with language make his way into his dreams as well: he speaks to his father in Spanish and English, and his French coworkers' fantastical counterparts speak in a mush-mouthed mockery of French. Stephane is disoriented both literally and figuratively, and his dreams take the concept and run with it.

Overall, I liked this movie much more than I had the first time. Without the constraints of expectations and with the freedom to let go of the plot and notice the details, I was able to really appreciate all of the layers that Michel Gondry was able to employ to support his vision. I was also able to appreciate how impressive it is to write and present a film that is utterly and unforgivingly of the moment and in the head of the narrator, something I've really begun to appreciate after reading Proust. (Some Proustian ideas of love are in here too, but that could be a whole other pretentious blog post.) We are not omniscient in this film; we are tied to Stephane in a way that limits our scope, and we are only given hints of the objective situation. Of course all of the visual aspects, the animation and the characters' tactile sensibilities were still amazing and on par with what I love about Gondry's work. But this time I was able to walk away confident that the movie was impressive beyond my presumptions. It's a film I look forward to rewatching.

Stasis

Shuffle this evening: Ryan Adams - This House Is Not For Sale Sufjan Stevens - Holland The Magnetic Fields - Meaningless Snoop Dogg - Beautiful Battles - Snare Hanger There is a point at which one's music library ceases to collect and hardens into a time capsule. I'm beginning to think now is that time.

The Graduate

One of my friends recently saw The Graduate for the first time, and sent two of us an email about it. DS and I had two separate but perhaps complementary ideas about the aims and ending of the film. I thought y'all might find this interesting. Below I've pasted our emails, spelling/grammar mistakes and all. What do you think?


Subject: The Graduate
------------------------

From: JW
Date: Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 12:25 AM
To: TS, DS

Just watched The Graduate for the first time and I was curious whether
the scenes with Ben pursuing Elaine were meant to be creepy or
romantic or neither? Obviously to modern sensibilities he's quite the
stalker but perhaps in the 60s following a girl around was seen as
romantic? Certainly she does end up reciprocating...

J

----------
From: DS
Date: Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 4:04 PM
To: JW
Cc: TS

The way I read it was as a subltey creepy and perhaps solipsistic pursuit and ending. The very last shot is the most damning one of the film, they're on the bus, grinning, not talking, consigned to spending the rest of each others lives together in relative alienation. I don't remember exactly, but aren't they surrounded by old, decrepit couples on the bus?

To me that's the central concern of Dustin Hoffman's character, the fear of the alienation of being an adult and entering the modern world of wage labor and shallow relationships, (like the oedipal one he has with Mrs. Robinson.) Hello darkness my old friend indeed.

----------
From: TS [Me]
Date: Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 4:55 PM
To: DS
Cc: JW
I haven't seen the movie in a while, but I'd always read the end as a testament to his persistent immaturity and as a damning realistic take on romance. Ben spends most of the movie in over his head without doing much about it: he doesn't know what he's doing with his life after school; he falls into an affair, more out of curiosity and laziness than anything else, while not making any career moves; and then he finally finds something in his life to latch after he connects with Elaine, but he finds he doesn't know how to go about it. His relationship with Elaine is the first thing he has been forced to fight for, and he goes about it with no grace whatsoever. I don't think they were meant to be romantic as much as clumsy and embarrassing. He's lucky Elaine likes him at all, because he played all the wrong cards. By the time they leave the wedding and get on the bus, I think they're both faced with those facts: wow, this tactic worked...what now? He's over his head again, and she's stuck with the guy who acted the way he did, on all counts (banged his mom, took her to a strip club to turn her off of himself, pursued her to Berkeley, etc.). Lots of movies have their characters do these ridiculous things, and they're rewarded for it without stepping back to think, hm, what does it really mean to be the person who does that kind of thing? Though the rom com in its current form didn't exist back then, the grand "romantic" gestures sure did, and I saw this movie as a contrasting reality check to those gestures. We're supposed to feel a bit creeped out, I think. Also, keep in mind that this is Dustin Hoffman here: the original beta male, he became known for playing complicated, yet somehow likeable underdog characters. He wasn't Robert Redford or Warren Beatty, and I think this peculiar star status lends itself to the role.

These are just impressions I remember from my last viewing. I also like [DS]'s reading of the film.

******************************
If you guys have other readings of the film, let me know in the comments below.

A Meandering Conversation: Lollapalooza Recap, Part 2

This is a joint blogging experiment with The Grind. I'll be covering Day 1, we'll do joint coverage of Day 2 (and post in both places), and he'll cover Day 3. 

We decided to do Part 2 conversationally, and seeing as we were face to face as is so little of our day, we decided to just record our natural conversation instead of typing it up unnaturally. Here's our conversation:



0:00 - The Black Lips
3:24 - Mayer Hawthorne
9:12 - Local Natives/"Tribal"
13:08 - Deftones
16:15 - Patrick Stump and Fall Out Boy
26:57 - Ween/Dinner
30:34 - Atmosphere
33:25 - Eminem
41:00 - Rap/Hip-hop and bad boys turned good/accepted