Deus in Machina: Transcendence

Like many people, I spent Sunday reflecting on a man who dies and then is resurrected. Unlike Christians who celebrated the death and rebirth of one incarnation of their tripartite deity, I was at my local IMAX cinema watching Johnny Depp's death and resurrection in Transcendence.

Transcendence is the directorial debut of Wally Pfister, a cinematographer best known for his work with Christopher Nolan. Pfister surely knows how to lens a movie but I recalled the last time a DP whose work I respected tried his hand at directing - Lost Souls. Janusz Kaminski took a break from shooting Steven Spielberg's film to make this mediocre horror flick. Would Pfister fare any better?

The movie begins with a brief prelude featuring a man who we will come to know as Max wandering the streets of a city that has no electricity. Streetlights are dark, broken cell phones litter the ground, and a laptop is used to prop open a door. He makes his way into a backyard where he kneels before two sunflowers and begins to eulogize two of his friends.

Flashing back a couple years, we are introduced to Will (Johnny Depp) and Evelyn Caster (Rebecca Hall). Will is an artificial intelligence researcher and his wife is trying to get him motivated to get to a conference where potential funders for his project can be found. Will is the dreamer type while Evelyn is more pragmatic. He focuses on getting a computer to be self-aware, much to the detriment of bathing and sartorial choices, while she plays the mom and gets him to change into something presentable.

After his speech, in which he admits to essentially "playing God", Will is shot by a member of a group called RIFT (Revolutionary Independence From Technology) which launches attacks other AI research labs at the same time. Will survives only to discover that the bullet that he was shot with was laced with polonium and he is fated to die a slow, painful death from radiation poisoning. Evelyn recalls that Will had uploaded the "consciousness" of a monkey into his super-mega quantum computer and decides to upload Will's into it so that he may live on. Max questions this decision and whether the transferring the electrical activity of Will's brain into a computer will create something that can fairly be called Will.

At this point the movie has introduced a fair amount of interesting thematic ideas. What is consciousness? Is our humanity merely an admittedly highly complex series of electrical impulses? Unfortunately, we get a rather generic action/thriller. After Will asks to be connected to the Internet, Evelyn and Max have a falling out which leaves Evelyn to care for the electronic simulacrum of her husband alone. RIFT kidnap Max and learn of Will's transubstantiation. Meanwhile Will asks that he be connected to the Internet so that he can expand his capabilities.

With RIFT closing in, Evelyn moves to upload Will to the cloud via a satellite connection. Luckily there were no birds looking for a spot to perch and the consciousness of a human being is only a megabyte or so in size because she only had a couple of minutes to complete the upload. I wonder what file type the human consciousness comes in - .will?

With Will living on somehow on the Internet, he plays the stock market and makes tens of millions, if not more, for a company owned by Evelyn and then directs her to a small desert town called Brightwood where she is to build an underground data center where Will can live on and carry out his nebulous plan. The place ends up being massive with an even more enormous farm of solar panels powering the whole thing. Of course no one in the federal government at-large seems to notice that a very large computer laboratory is being built in the desert nor a vast amount of data traffic to and from some podunk town in the southwest. Maybe Will used IP6 and IANA never noticed.

Once fully armed and operational, Will miraculously becomes an expert in nanotechnology and begins experimenting on some of the local contractors making them into superheroes with incredible strength the and power to regenerate. In fact, Will is so goddamn good, he can grow a copy of his old body in the lab. Will has become a god and his ability to monitor Evelyn's limbic system in real time so perturbs that she loses trust in him and escapes his clutches. She is captured by the FBI who joins forces with RIFT and Will's buddy Joseph, who also ran an AI lab, to make their last stand for humanity. They get themselves some machine guns, a mortar, and a couple howitzers. Oh, and a computer virus which take out Will's systems as well as every other computer system on the planet. The plan calls for Evelyn to be infected with the virus so that, when Will uploads her consciousness into his system, it becomes infected. Bullets and explosives don't cut it against nanobots and the augmented contractors. It all comes to the bad ass RIFT lady threatening Max's life to get Will to upload the virus himself and end it all.

Perhaps it's because I work in IT but I just can't look beyond the techno-asshattery in this movie. Here the Internet is essentially magic instead of being a bunch of computers connected together. You just take a technology, add the Internet and – voila! – you have a god-like power. During the sequence when Will is being uploaded to his quantum computer, we see that it is a process that takes weeks. His face is scanned and Will is recorded reading the OED so that his likeness and voice can later be used in the interface. This takes weeks yet, after this, everything is done is done lickety split. Where did Evelyn upload Will's consciousness to? You don't upload something to the Internet, you upload it to a computer on the Internet. The electronic Will can advance nanotechnology beyond our wildest dreams, can build his old wetware body from scratch but he can't advance solar panel technology beyond the point of needing a few square miles of panels?

Beyond the IT realm, Transcendence disappoints in other ways. For instance, the world is faced with the gravest threat it's ever known short of nuclear war and all that humanity can muster in its defense is a handful of anti-technology radicals, a few G-men, a mortar, and a couple howitzers?

Moving onto the acting, I have to say that this move was a colossal waste. Johnny Depp spends a short while at the beginning playing a bland genius before spending the rest of his time doing a mediocre HAL 9000 imitation. Morgan Freeman as Joseph just called in his umpteenth performance as the wizened mentor. There was nothing unique or animated about anyone's performance here. For the most part, people stood around watching Will's next move in a mixture of awe and fear. The story didn't help much. The scene where the simulacrum of Will comes alive in the computer was positively anti-climactic. There was no time to dwell on such a momentous occasion because we had to race to Will's apotheosis. Indeed, there was no time to dwell on much at all. Why bother to consider questions about the nature of consciousness or our relationship with technology when Max has to be kidnapped and solar panels have to be erected? I think more time was devoted to showing nanobots rebulding those solar panels destroyed by mortar fire than to considering the "big questions" posed in the opening minutes of the film.

Another example of this comes at the end of the movie. The fully-resurrected Will and Evelyn are lying on a bed dying. Will reveals that the electronic simulacrum was really the old Will and that he did everything in order to bring her dream of a better world to fruition. Awwww. While a nice, tidy way to end a love story, the whole revelation was a dud because A) the movie avoided discussing whether or not the thing that the characters considered to be Will could really be loaded onto a computer and B) Will and Evelyn's relationship wasn't developed enough. The script sets Will up as an Apollonian figure – and individual who uses the human capacity of reason to its full extent while Evelyn is the Dionysian figure – she's all about advancing or healing the whole of humanity and is emotional. Will's cold expressions and voice dominate his UI while Evelyn cries and gets angry. But these antipodean dispositions don't conflict or intermingle very much and so, when Will gives his confession, it didn't feel like it resolved much. Rather than a relationship tempered by opposing outlooks ending with a bang, it limped to a conclusion with a whimper.

Transcendence reminded me of many cinematic adaptions of Philip K. Dick novels. Take the interesting concepts and then ignore them as ideas and instead use them as springboards for excitement, action, violence, and fresh fruit!

The Zero Theorem Trailer

Terry Gilliam's latest movie looks to be a hoot. I love the use of short lenses here. Appears to have been shot in a style akin to that of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Unfortunately I've read that no U.S. distribution has been obtained yet.

Trailer for Under the Skin

An alien is sent to Earth to pick up hitchhikers to have them sent back to her planet to be a delicacy. Sounds wonderfully odd. The trailer surely is.

Life in Space Is Impossible: Gravity by Alfonso Cuarón

Alfonso Cuarón proved himself to be a fan of the long take in Children of Men but the opening sequence in Gravity would surely make Orson Welles envious. (Although Aleksandr Sokurov might not be quite so impressed.) The opening shot lasts somewhere on the order of 15 minutes as the camera glides in and around two astronauts who are working on the Hubble Telescope outside their space shuttle which is parked in orbit around our blue globe. George Clooney plays Matt Kowalski, a NASA veteran on his last mission. He is outfitted with a propulsion pack thingy that allows him to remain untethered to the shuttle or its robotic arm. As Dr. Stone, played by Sandra Bullock works on a faulty circuit board, Kowalski zips around like a kid with a new toy lamenting all the while that he won't be the record for longest spacewalk.

Soon enough the fun ends as mission control in Houston interrupts the proceedings by announcing that the Russians have destroyed one of their own satellites and that the debris will be making its way to their position. They are to abandon their mission and return ASAP. Ryan is sure she can finish her repairs quickly and ignores Kowalski's order to return to the shuttle. Regardless, the debris is upon them and rips through the robotic arm keeping the Hubble in check. Our astronauts are flung off into space.

In 3D and on the IMAX screen, Cuarón's visual representation of angular momentum makes for one of the most visceral cinema experiences ever to be had. The camera follows Ryan as she is flung from the wreckage ass over tea kettle out into space. It was truly harrowing to watch her summersault her way towards the void in a panic, unable to stop spinning or figure out where she is in relation to the shuttle. Kowalski, however, has the propulsion suit and comes to rescue.

Tethered together, the pair make their way to the shuttle only to find that it too was ripped apart by the debris and that the other astronauts did not survive. Kowalski then points to their next destination, the International Space Station where a Soyuz module should be available for a return to Earth. Ryan's suit is running out of oxygen and she remains panicked. Kowalski is the definition of calm here and he tries to take Ryan's mind off of their desperate situation by engaging her in some chit-chat. He asks her what awaits her when she finally returns to Earth and we learn that her daughter had been killed.

We also learn that, in the film, when it rains, it pours. Approaching the ISS, our heroes see that one of the Soyuz modules is gone and that the parachute of the remaining one has already been deployed. They crash land onto the structure but, due to momentum once again, it proves difficult to get a hold of anything. Ryan's legs get wound up in the parachute's cords but manages to grab Kowalski's suit. Realizing that both oxygen and time is running out, Kowalski detaches himself from Ryan so that she may go on.

And she does. Ryan makes it inside the ISS where tragedy once again strikes and she gets into the remaining Soyuz capsule to escape the debris which is coming round again. Trapped in an unmaneuverable craft, Ryan despairs before she gives up. She shuts down all of the systems and prepares to fall asleep never to wake up again when a face appears in the window. Kowalski opens the hatch and lets himself in. As cheerful as ever, he immediately sniffs out the obligatory vodka bottle before encouraging Ryan to carry on using the knowledge she has from her flight training. Kowalski is gone in one oneiric poof but Ryan has gained a new lust for life and is determined to make her way to a Chinese space station where she will find a functional escape pod and finally get home.

Gravity is a resounding success as the cinematic equivalent of a roller coaster. The CGI, flowing camerawork, and 3D all combined to make me feel as if I too were stuck in orbit and gave me case of vertigo. Cuarón also deserves credit for refusing to cut to scenes of mission control in Houston and instead keep the viewer immersed in the peril that the astronauts find themselves in. He also pulled one out of the 2001: A Space Odyssey playbook and made sure that there was no sound in space. Instead we heard what Ryan "heard" when her space suit came into contact with objects. Plus there was the spectral music of the soundtrack and Ryan panting for breath.

While the movie's style and verisimilitude all contribute to a visceral experience, the thematic material presented here by Cuarón is thin gruel. Ryan's adventure in space – the disasters, the capitulation, the rekindled desire to live, and rebirth are all supposed to reflect upon her inner life. (At the end, her capsule crash lands in a lake and she removes her space suit so she can swim back to shore where she emerges from the water in her underwear a la Ripley in Alien.) The tether to the shuttle's arm is akin to an umbilical cord and emerging from the water onto terra firma is an allegory for birth. But we learn so very little about Ryan that the allegorical elements are reduced to the barest of footnotes next to the vast 3D spectacle of her survival in space. Religion pops up but only in the form of a Russian Orthodox icon on the Soyuz dashboard and a Buddha on the dash of the Chinese capsule. This is a joke and not some commentary on religion.

You have a character lost and facing death in the most remote, secluded spot that we humans can currently and realistically get to yet all Cuarón can give us is an action/survival tale with some ham-fisted allegory. Just imagine what Werner Herzog would have done with this scenario. Mankind as a mere mote in relation to the vastness of the universe, fate, people driven to extremes – this is fertile thematic ground.

I appreciated that Cuarón utilized stylistic elements generally associated with art film like very long takes and his refusal to cut away from the action in orbit to create such an immersive thrill ride but, in the end, it would have been nice had he taken the opportunity to also inject some food for thought into the movie as well.

More Polish Films

I noted earlier that the Madison Polish Film Festival has announced dates and films. It was my hope that Aftermath and/or 1939: The Secret of Westerplatte would be brought north but, alas, it was not to be.

But all is not lost. The fest here in Madison piggybacks off of the Polish Film Festival in America, a much larger event held annually in Chicago. That fest begins in three days and lasts until the 24th of this month. And both of the above films are to screen.





I recently found out about Martin Scorsese Presents: Masterpieces of Polish Cinema.



Scorsese is apparently curating this exhibition of 21 classic Polish films all of which have been restored. Screenings start in New York come February and then move on to various cities around the country with Chicago likely being the closest stop to Madison. It looks to be quite a treat and would really love the chance to see The Hourglass Sanatorium (Sanatorium pod klepsydra) and The Saragossa Manuscript (Rekopis znaleziony w Saragossie) on the big screen.

23rd Annual Madison Polish Film Festival

The dates and films for the 23rd Annual Madison Polish Film Festival have been announced. There will be four films in total with two screened on Saturday, 23 November and the remaining on Saturday, 7 December. All films are to be screened at the Marquee Theatre at Union South and are in Polish with English subtitles. Here's the line-up:

23 November

1PM
Loving (Miłość) dir. Sławomir Fabicki, 2012
Maria and Tomek are in their 30's, have been happily married for 10 years, and are expecting a baby soon. All of the sudden, their peaceful relationship is put to the test by an unexpected event. This drama explores the complex nature of love and how jealousy, fear, responsibility, empathy, and forgiveness affect loving relationships.



3PM
In The Name Of (W imię) dir. Małgorzata Szumowska, 2013
Adam is a Catholic priest who directs a reintigration center for orphans with behavioral problems in rural Poland. His loneliness in the village is matched with his personal life, as he desires men - a sexual inclination deemed by his own religious beliefs as both amoral and intrinsically evil. When Adam meets Łukasz he finds himself caught between his profession and his crippling need to be loved. His infatuation remains well-hidden, yet when a young boy in his care commits suicide, he finds himself under the harsh judicial glare of the church.




7 December

1PM
The Closed Circuit (Układ Zamknięty) dir. Ryszard Bugajski, 2013
Inspired by real events that took place in 2003, this film relates the misfortunes of three businessmen who fall victim to a conspiracy of sorts, led by a corrupt group of jurists and tax department employees. One day, at 6 a.m., anti-terrorist intervention teams, guns in hand, enter the homes of these three businessmen, who have no idea of the origin of the accusations brought against them by the district attorney: they are accused of being criminals laundering money. Put in jail and kept from having any contact with their families who are being harassed by government employees, they can only count on the help of a young journalist who will risk his career on television to do everything he can to unveil the truth.



3PM
Dzień Kobiet (Women's Day) dir. Maria Sadowska, 2012
Halina, a cashier in a chain-store is hoping for a better life for herself and her 13 year old daughter, Misia. As soon as she can, Halina becomes the store manager; as manager she discovers that dishonesty, manipulation, and deceit are part of the price for a higher salary and standard of living. Halina soon loses track of past friendships, as well as her relationship with her daughter; will she take the opportunity to set things right? The absurdity of consumerism and its subsequent re-evaluation of values are called into question by this film that depicts an evolving Polish reality.

A Sneak Peek and Two Interivews of Interest

Errol Morris' next film is The Unknown Known, a profile of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and he has released a sneak peek.



Looks to be entertaining.

Terry Gilliam's latest film, The Zero Theorem, is scheduled to open later this year. It's about a computer genius who is directed to solve the titular mathematical problem which would give the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

The Playlist has a nice interview with Gilliam about the project.

It’s a very hard thing to describe as far as storytelling but there is a man who really wants to be on his own even though his work is about a very big question; whether the universe is in control or chaos. He just wants to get away from people and everything, just be alone, and yet he’s not allowed to be. Some of that is good and some of it is bad. He discovers his humanity in the course. Where he ends up is a surprise.

It looks suitably bizarre. Should be good.



Another good interview comes courtesy of Filmmaker magazine. This time around the subject is visual effects artist Douglas Trumbull. He talks, amongst other things, about working with Stanley Kubrick on 2001 and Terrance Malick on The Tree of Life as well as his new film process that builds upon IMAX.

I’m working on a film right now that is an experiment for the process where we are shooting 3D, 4K and 120 frames per second and will project at 10 times the brightness of cinemas... The movies will be so unusual that they won’t make any sense on your laptop, television, tablet or cell phone. My objective is to go totally weird and make something people feel is really worth going out to a movie theater to see.

Stalingrad Trailer

There's a new trailer out for Stalingrad, an epic 3D IMAX love story set in the midst of the Battle of Stalingrad. It looks to be a really intense experience. Unfortunately director Fedor Bondarchuk apparently reckons himself the Russian Zak Snyder with actions being slowed down in media res. Too bad.

It has a Columbia Pictures logo in the opening so it will presumably get a release here in the States.

The Congress Trailer

This is the trailer for The Congress, a movie about an aging actress or model who sells her image and then things get all Phildickian. Looks interesting at the very least. It's based (loosely by the sounds of it) on a book by Polish sci-fi author Stanislaw Lem.

Gravity Trailer

Alfonso Cuarón finally returns with Gravity. Sandra Bullock and George Clooney star as two astronauts who survive the destruction of their space shuttle and are trapped in orbit. Presumably gravity gets a hold of them and they are slowly pulled towards the Earth. Emmanuel Lubezki is the DP here. He shot Children of Men for Cuarón and he's been Terrence Malick's cinematographer since 2005 so it should be pretty.

I am not sure I can watch this much less on 3D IMAX. I'd probably get vertigo.

To the Wonder Delayed

A few weeks ago Terrence Malick's latest movie, To the Wonder was scheduled to open here in Madison at Sundance this month. The film's website now lists a 22 August date at the UW Cinematheque. What happened?

Not to demean Cinematheque, because they are a great organization, but a week-long run would be really nice. Contra Rob Thomas, not everyone who wants to see it will be able to make it. Plus it's a Malick film. The bigger the screen, the better.

Alive in the Superunknown: Upstream Color

I recall having a very fun conversation with my friend Aaron in which we tried to make sense of Shane Carruth's time travel parable Primer and thusly I was happy to hear that Carruth had final come up with a follow-up, Upstream Color. Here he has a larger budget but hasn't moved towards the mainstream or made a film which is in any way easy to decipher.

The film's first act follows a character only known as Thief. He cultivates plants which have a certain worm or grub that lives in the soil with their roots. A couple teenagers experiment with a hastily prepared tincture of the worm and find that it has a weird effect, namely, that it allows for a low-level form of mind control. Thief, on the other hand, goes for bigger prey. He forces a whole worm down the throat of an unsuspecting victim named Kris that he spies at a club. This allows him to have full control over her.

Before getting her to give up her life savings to him, Thief has Kris do seemingly inane activities like transcribing Moby Dick and convinces her that he has a condition which causes his head to be as bright as the sun so that she looks away from him. Once Thief has gotten the money and run, Kris wakes up under his spell no longer, though with no memory of what happened to her. She finds that the worm inside her has grown as it writhes around under her skin and that surgery with a chef's knife is not particularly effective. The cure for this is offered by The Sampler. He has setup shop out in a field with speakers that play a low, rumbling beat which mysteriously draws Kris. He draws the worm out and into a pig.

Kris begins the process of getting her life back together when she meets Jeff on the train. She is understandably cautious about letting Jeff into her life at first. But she takes the plunge and we discover that he too has had an encounter with Thief. Their romance is oddly compelling as these two lost souls try to find themselves as well as courage to find someone else to have in their lives. Scenes consisting of jump cuts where the pair try to sort out their memories, unsure which ones belong to whom are sad and romantic at the same time.

The Sampler, meanwhile, understands the power of the worms. Once removed from a person's body, they take with them memories from their former host or, perhaps, allow him to peer into the recess of the former hosts' minds, places they themselves may not be able to look into. Although this porcine Rube Goldberg contraption of a mind reading system is never fully explained, it seems that the worms respond to sound as he uses various field recordings that he has made to somehow stimulate the worms and allows him to experience the memories of others.

Upstream Color is reminiscent of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind but is much more abstruse with the Phildickian aspects turned up to eleven. The sci-fi aspects of the plot are never grounded in any kind of internal logic. Thief and The Sampler are not fleshed out with them remaining a thief and a voyeur, respectively. And so the focus is on Kris and Jeff. They see through a glass darkly with their relationship moving in fits and starts. I think that the movie portrayed the nervousness, the fun, and also the sadness of getting to know someone intimately very well. It felt realistic at the face-to-face level while being mired in absurdity when you step back. Perhaps what makes their relationship interesting is that Carruth cuts between Kris & Jeff and scenes of The Sampler & his pig farm. I felt that the mystery of The Sampler and his porcine friends contrasted nicely with the more tender story of two lovers and their search.

While I don't think there is a definitive reading of Upstream Color except in Carruth's head, I do think there are clues I missed which could fill in some holes in my understanding of the plot. For instance, at one point Kris thinks she is pregnant and at the same time the sow that received the worm from her body is revealed to be so. There is some kind of link between former and current hosts. The Sampler kills the piglets by tucking them in a sack and throwing it into a river. He explicitly shows a blue liquid – the worm "essence" - drifting out of their corpses on the bottom of the river. Does The Sampler kill them just because he doesn't want any more pigs? Does this act exert control or influence over Kris? Or is he feeding the eldritch blue orchids which grow along the river and among whose roots the strange worms live? On a second viewing I would also be cognizant of match on action cuts. There were a few and I suspect they aren't there for purely aesthetic reasons.

Upstream Color has a goodly amount of thematic material to chew on. It's about tragedy and finding control over our lives. In the spirit of Blade Runner, I'd say it's also about memories and their role in being human. These are heady topics to be sure but Carruth couches them in a friendly, albeit odd, way which proves to be perfectly suited for pondering.

WFF '13: Beyond the Hills

Roughly 10 years ago film critics decided that there was such a thing as the Romanian New Wave and Madison even had a Romanian Film Festival for a while. A few years ago it was subsumed by the Wisconsin Film Festival and, as far as I can tell, is now a thing of the past. However the WFF does seem to make it a point to include Romanian films. This year the festival screened Beyond the Hills by Cristian Mungiu whose 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days what shown five or six years ago.

Beyond the Hills allows the audience to watch as Voichita and Alina sift through the remains of their relationship which has withered over time and distance. As the film opens, Voichita is walking along a rail platform looking for someone. She eventually sees Alina on a different platform across a set of tracks and yells out for her to stay there. While Voichita says this because a train is coming, it also summarizes neatly her feelings for her former friend and lover.

The pair grew up together in an orphanage. At first they were friends but, as maturity neared, they also became lovers. Alina eventually left Romania to seek her fortunes in Germany while Voichita stayed behind and joined a small rural convent. Some time has passed and Alina has returned to seek solace in Voichita and also to bring her back to Germany. The problem is that Voichita is happy or at least content with her life. She is desperate to comfort her former lover but realizes that they have grown into different people and that their fates are to be separate.

Alina doesn't take the rejection well. Having lost her faith, she doesn't understand why Vaichita would want to remain cloistered away in a place with no electricity or running water while taking orders from an overbearing priest who preaches that the West is decadent and corrupt. And she reacts like a child. Disbelief at first followed by vain attempts to change Alina's mind. Finally she starts lashing out.

Father Nusu is concerned that Alina's presence is distracting his flock from God and decrees that she must leave. She does but returns to the monastery. It becomes increasingly evident to the audience that Alina has mental health issues and she is bound and gagged so as not to hurt anyone, including herself, and to prevent her from disturbing the routine at the monastery. The Father and his nuns come to believe that she has become possessed by Satan and decides to perform an exorcism. Things don't go well at first but Nusu perseveres. Eventually it seems as if Alina is cured but she suddenly collapses and is DOA at the hospital. As the film nears its end, the secular authorities become involved.

As is the case with the other two Romanian New Wave films I've seen, Beyond the Hills is a slow, tempered affair. André Bazin would have been in hog heaven here as Mungiu and his cinematographer Oleg Mutu opt for long takes, a fair amount of depth of field, and widescreen so that everyone can fit in the frame at the same time obviating the need for shot-reverse shot. It has a natural feeling here as our eyes dart around to catch multiple facial expressions instead of an editor cutting to a close-up to give primacy to one or another. For instance, at the dinner table Father Nusu holds court and denounces the West while extolling the virtue of his religious path. Alina wears an expression of distaste while Voichita looks nervous and the rest of the nuns look on in timid agreement.

Beyond the Hills is a very fluid film. Mungui changes the focus of the story and shifts the audience's sympathies towards characters around. It begins with the relationship between Alina and Voichita at the fore but shifts towards Father Nusu and his followers. At first Alina comes across as an immature, self-centered teenager but we come to feel sorry for her as we realize that she is ill and is bound against her will by Nusu. Father Nusu also transforms. He is pompous and overbearing but his sincerity and concern for Alina eventually come through. And as the film ends, he is pitiful and seemingly broken as he is lectured by the police and taken away to be charged in Alina's death.

I highly suspect there's more than a dash of social commentary here. But being an ignorant American, I can't tell you what it is. I wish I knew more about the role of the Eastern Orthodox Church in Romania, for instance. It takes a while but Nusu does gain some audience sympathy. And the nuns come across as a bunch of lemmings who see Satan everywhere and react with hysterics. On the secular side of things, orphanages come out looking OK but the hospital is portrayed as having given up on its obligations. Does the Romanian medical system have a reputation? And is there a general attitude towards Western Europe?

My ignorance aside, there is a lot to chew on here. The changing nature of friendship, obedience to authority, and religious duty are some of the ideas Mungui throws out for us to consider. What obligations do we have to one another? How should one deal with conflicting obligations? The film doesn't seem eager to give much in the way of definitive answers. The final scene appears to reject clarity. As Nusu and some of the nuns are in the back of an idling police van waiting for the prosecutor to arrive. A vehicle drives by and splashes mud all over the van's window. The movie ends with the wipers struggling to clear the mess.

WFF '13: Post Tenebras Lux

Post Tenebras Lux, Latin for “After darkness, light”, will surely go down as the most divisive, if not most loathed, film of this year's Wisconsin Film Festival. Director Carlos Reygadas has constructed a surreal story that plays out like random scenes from a life rather than a linear tale that will surely alienate viewers looking for a linear tale.

The film opens with a small girl wandering a rain-soaked field with mountains in the background as dogs shepherd cows and horses around her. The scene plays out slowly with the sky darkening as night approaches and a thunderstorm rolls in. It was beautifully shot with a Steadicam (not unlike many scenes in Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life) with flowing pans and constant movement of camera and subjects. We then cut to a dimly lit door inside a modern house in a scene that resembles something from Paranormal Activitywith artificial lighting and a static camera. The door opens and a red glow enfolds the room as a tall, thin CGI figure enters the room. It has the head of a goat, cloven feet, and is naked with its male genitalia dangling between its legs. The figure carries a toolbox and wanders down a hall where a small boy sees it from his room before it disappears through a door across the hall.

We soon find out that the girl in the opening is the daughter of Juan and Natalia and that it was her dream. It is a lovely morning and she awakens her parents with her cries. Natalia rises from bed and we glimpse her beautiful before she dons a robe and attends to her daughter. We also find out that the boy who witnessed the spectral figure is their son. Juan is an architect and he has moved his family into a picturesque rural area of Mexico. In the scene their lives seem idyllic. Natalia plays with her daughter while Juan tickles his son and there is laughter all around. But soon a dark side of Juan is revealed when he mercilessly beats one of his dogs for a transgression which remains unknown and offscreen.

Juan and his relationship with Natalia ostensibly form the core of Post Tenebras Lux. We witness scenes from their lives that jump around in time and space. For instance, we see them when the kids are older at a fancy home where the family matriarch is holding court. In another scene the children are young again and the couple argues over sex. Natalia may have curves in all the right places but their sex life is apparently in shambles. Juan is passive-aggressive here moving from apology to more conflict in a split second. Later we suddenly find them at an anonymous bath house in Paris traversing rooms full of naked and wet (and mostly older) couples looking for the Duchamp room. Once they find it, Natalia disrobes and enjoys being fucked by a strange man while she is cradled in the arms of an older woman who is, again, a stranger.

When Juan and Natalia's dysfunctional marriage is not on display, we get glimpses of the other folks in the area. We see Juan admitting to a porn addiction at an AA meeting after others tell their own more tragic tales, for instance. At the meeting a man known as Seven gives a laundry list of the work he has done on Juan's house which highlights Juan's relative wealth. A tension is built here between Juan, who is lighter skinned, and the townspeople who are darker skinned. Later Juan catches Seven and a friend robbing his house and Seven ends up shooting him. This dose of social commentary gets lost, however, as we return to Juan and Natalia or other diversions such as the scenes of boys at an English school playing rugby and trees falling in the woods.

Post Tenebras Lux plays out in a dreamy expressionist way. The various scenes don't really tell a story in as much as they show human passions alight and suggest things about the characters. Some shots have their edges blurred lending a dream-like quality to them. We are told that the opening scene is a dream and perhaps the whole film is. It is surely fractured enough to be. While Juan is not a particularly likeable protagonist, the scenes with him and Natalia have a raw, brutal honesty to them. It is weird suddenly being transported to a sex club but there is also something tender about the pleasure Natalia takes in having sex with a stranger.

There is a scene where one of the men from town auto-decapitates which no doubt leaves audiences puzzled but it's the scene with the red goat-man figure that sticks with me. Is he a demon or Satan? Or perhaps he is Pan, the Greek god of wilderness and spring fertility, taking his tools into the marital bedroom to fix a broken relationship? Either view will work. Reygadas is not interested in presenting a definitive story with its own rules of cause and effect. Instead he is concerned here with giving his audience the raw material – shots of nature, human drama, passion, dreams, and the supernatural - to form its own story and its own interpretations.

WFF '13: Lore

Lore is a semi-Bildungsroman set in the final days of World War II and features the title character, a girl settling into her teenage years. She is the dutiful eldest daughter of an SS officer and as the film opens Lore greets her father only to be told to start packing. Unbeknownst to the girl, the Battle of Berlin is lost. Lore's parents try to keep a good face on for their children but Lore begins to see the cracks in their story when her father shoots the family dog.

With Allied troops encroaching the family leaves their stately manor and take up residence in a farmhouse nestled in the Black Forest. Further cracks appear to Lore when she witnesses her parents' deteriorating relationship. Lore's world is already on a shaky foundation but gets totally turned upside down when her father is arrested by the Allies and her mother decides to turn herself in. Before doing so she instructs Lore to take her siblings to her grandmother who lives near Hamburg. In a wrenching scene, the woman can't honestly answer Lore's question about whether she will return and rejects her own infant son and thrusts him back into Lore's arms before regaining composure and saying her final farewells to her eldest daughter.

Until this point Lore seems dutiful yet sheltered. She knows how to be a good German girl but seems remarkably ignorant of what is happening in the world. But with her parents gone, Lore begins to understand that her life of comfort is over and that she must protect her siblings from a world which is not as nice as she was led to believe. She decides to adopt the facade of her parents and remain at the farmhouse with her sister and three brothers. But, when one of her brothers is caught stealing milk, the antagonism of the neighbors which had previously stayed just below the surface rises above. Lore gathers her brothers and sister together and they head for grandma's house.

They travel on foot across fields and down country roads. Brother Peter is but a toddler and cries almost constantly. At first the people they meet are not unfriendly but the horror of their situation begins to manifest itself at an abandoned farmhouse where Lore discovers the bloodied corpse of a woman. But she also encounters a young man resting upstairs. She apologizes and leaves him. They make their way to a refugee camp where they stop and rest.

Lore's innocence further retreats when she witnesses a man raping a woman. On a kiosk are photographs of Holocaust victims with messages from the Allies. Lore is transfixed by them and begins to realize that her country was not all that she was told. Pointedly, other onlookers decry the posters as propaganda. Also there is Thomas, the man Lore found previously in the farmhouse. He forces himself on her but she flees. Still, he follows them and helps out when the kids are stopped by U.S. forces. If the film hinted at Lore's views about Jews, they come to the fore as Thomas offers his identity papers to a G.I. and she sees that he is Jewish. She allows him to be their protector for the rest of the journey but doesn't want to be touched by this Jew.

Before Lore's mother leaves her, she tells her daughter to remember who she is and the film does a nice job of portraying Lore remembering that then forgetting as she is transformed from a child to a young woman. Necessity is the mother of invention. Seeing her family and her society dissolve before her eyes quickly teaches her that adults lie. Death was something of an abstraction to her until she came across that body at the farm. She also becomes a sexual creature in the course of her journey. Upon seeing the rape, she watches briefly with disgust but also fascination. Later, when she no longer has jewelry to offer in barter, she offers her body to a man with a boat that could ferry her group across a river. Lore had come a long way from daddy's little girl and she would go on to offer it to Thomas as well.

Thomas is a mysterious figure. He's in early 20s with dark hair and dark eyes both of which contrast with the blonde hair and blue eyes of Lore and her siblings. Although he tries to force himself on Lore at the camp, he eventually becomes an indispensable companion who protects the children, gathers food, and helps them navigate their newly-occupied country. Clinging to the beliefs with which she was raised, Lore is repulsed and stand-offish yet Thomas persists. However, seeing the photos of death camp prisoners, learning the anti-Semitic views of an old woman they encounter, and being the beneficiary of Thomas' tenderness and protectiveness which came out of nowhere, her views change. No longer a naïve girl who mimics her parents' views, Lore becomes a young woman who gains her own ideas forged from tribulation and experience.

Lore beautifully captures the German countryside but director Cate Shortland and cinematographer Adam Arkapaw like to keep the camera close. Shots of the characters walking always begin with close-ups of feet that wander in and out of focus. The same holds true when it comes to revealing inner states. Much of the time this involves people's faces but also simple human contact such as when hands reach for other hands or in bathing scenes where arms and legs dominate the screen. When Lore offers herself to Thomas, everything is in close-up with her hand taking his and placing it inside her dress between her legs. This style draws Lore away from the larger tragedies of the war and the Holocaust and makes it an intimate portrait of a girl becoming a woman.

The Silence

The Silence begins with Timo looking at himself in the mirror as he shaves. It's an apt image for this German semi-murder mystery which draws comparisons to The Killing and Twin Peaks. While this film has elements of those TVs shows, The Silence puts the mystery aspect into the background for the most part and instead brings to the fore the struggles of an anonymous German town's inhabitants as they deal with loss, grief, and obsession.

On a beautiful summer day in 1986, an 11-year old girl is out riding her bicycle in the bucolic German countryside. Timo and his friend Peer are out driving after having watched some child pornography. They follow the girl in their car down a lane. Peer jumps out, catches the girl, and proceeds to rape her before ending her life. All the while Timo sits in the car looking horrified yet he remains silent. His guilt doesn't exactly get the better of him but he does leave town. (I haven't divulged any spoilers here because we see exactly who does what in this brutal opening.)

Twenty three years later the case hasn't been solved. The girl's body was eventually found in a lake but Peer was never brought to justice. Meanwhile Timo got married became a father and, generally speaking, leads a nice middle class life while the detective on the case, Krischan Mittich, celebrates his retirement. Amidst life going on seemingly normally, another 11-year old girl goes missing with her belongings found at the same site where the first victim was killed back in 1986.

Old wounds are reopened and we see that the guilt and sadness from the events in 1986 still haunt many people in the town while others have their own newly-minted problems. Krischan is convinced that it's the same killer and, despite having retired, he begins to investigate on his own. In one scene, he holds a stack of case files and notes that the first investigation ended his marriage. Elena, the mother of the first victim, has seemingly never even started to lift herself from the depths of perdition. She is a doleful figure who has constructed a shrine to her grief by keeping her daughter's room the same as it was in 1986. The detective in charge of the case is David who became a widower just months previously. At one point he asks Elena when the pain begins to go away and she replies, "Never."

With the second murder, the question becomes whether Peer has struck again or if there is a copycat killer on the loose. Guilt gets the better of Timo and he returns to the town in order to confront Peer. Their reunion is absolutely chilling. The onscreen tension is so thick you could cut it with the wrong side of a knife. Timo's face is full of desperation as the life he carefully built up falls apart while Peer wears a smile that may or may not be hiding something. In the end, David is the only person who seems to be able to break through his anguish as he is able to get to the bottom of the case.

The Silence is based upon a novel by Jan Costin Wagner and is Baran bo Odar's directorial debut. Odar and his crew deserve a lot of credit for creating an extremely creepy film that takes place in the glaring sunlight of summer. The mise en scène is very warm yet the characters and events are so unsettling. On the outside everything is bathed by the sun but on the inside the characters are swallowed by shadows. Their abilities to move beyond the past and to struggle with the ineffable while still going forward are obscured, perhaps forever.