FILM COMMENT SELECTS: BEFORE I FORGET, CHOP SHOP and DIARY OF THE DEAD Reviews
As promised, here's the first batch of mini-reviews of this year's FILM COMMENT SELECTS program. The program will be held at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade theater in Manhattan (70 Lincoln Center Plaza) from February 14th-28th. More info can be found here.
BEFORE I FORGET (2007) Dir: Jacques Nolot
Nolot’s entry at this year’s FCS is exactly the kind of film that the program was made to highlight. Confrontational, gripping and a little too serious, it’s an excellent entry to Nolot’s oeuvre and one which has whetted my appetite to see more of his films. BEFORE I FORGET comes closer to accomplishing what Jean-Claude Brisseau’s EXTERMIANTING ANGELS did, namely a look at the nature of taboo desire. Brisseau’s film was also featured at FCS last year so the analogy comes easily considering how it seems like BEFORE I FORGET is this year’s token “explicitly sexual French film.” Where Brisseau’s EXTERMINATING ANGELS focused on the taboos of female sexuality in a way that highlighted more of the sex than the actual philosophy, BEFORE I FORGET is a very spare, brooding look at homosexuality and old age which jars the viewer out of complacency with its brief but graphic sex scenes. Undoubtedly part of the shock may come from my muddled hetero views of gay sex but regardless of the fact that watching two men boff may seem more risqué than two or three women, but its apparent that Nolot wants to make the audience squirm a little. From the way the characters freely refer to Pasolini and the predictable Mahler quotation at the film’s end, its apparent that he aspires to straddle philosophy and the gutter in ways that would make Luchino Visconti smile. In other words, he wants to make BEFORE I FORGET the contemporary equivalent of DEATH IN VENICE and he succeeds in the best and worst ways.
Nolot stars as Pierre, a sixty year-old ex-gigolo whose age and fears of oblivion have effectively frayed his ties to the gay community. “I’ve stopped doing things,” Nolot explains to the ex-lover of an ex-lover. “I sublimate.” Pierre spends much of his time in his apartment ruminating over past affairs but always returns to memories of Toutoune (Albert Mainella), the now dying patron that he took for granted so many years ago. Though he willfully avoids anyone close to his age, Pierre’s seemingly random encounters with aging and decrepit rivals and acquaintances continue to remind Pierre of how old he’s become. Infected with HIV, Pierre’s regular visits from young gigolos become more costly and his regular analysis sessions become stuck in the rut of wistfully remembering times when he and Roland Barthes would go cruising and Barthes would call him a whore…in the semantic sense, of course.
Even when he’s recalling moments as endearing for the audience as that, there is no humor in Pierre’s voice. His apartment is his prison as he can’t bring himself to write or to bring himself to want anything else except to drift along in the company of anyone who will listen. Nolot’s series of detailed monologues are certainly engrossing but after a while the film’s philosophy of rejecting the human joys of mere existence and it becomes that anything that might suggest a lighter touch would be deemed “stupidity” by Pierre. As a DJ declares, “stupidity” or what a more accurate translation would call “little jokes” are a means of denying the mirror other people put up to us. In other words, to take one’s own mortality any less seriously would be a basic rejection of the severity of the matter. So why not smoke some cigarettes, take back the tokens of affection that once made you happy and listen to some Mahler as you let the great darkness swallow you whole? Man, where’s Tadzio when you need him.
CHOP SHOP (2007) Dir: Ramin Bahrani
Since his debut feature film MAN PUSH CART grabbed critics’ attention in 2005 and 2006, Ramin Bahrani has been an auteur on the cusp of making good on his considerable promise as a filmmaker. MAN set up a tenuous and sometimes overreaching verité fable analogy between pushcart operator Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi) and his world that made him a figure of near-mythic bad luck. Every time he comes close to something that might lead to his happiness it’s taken away, leaving him only the periods in between the promise of success and ultimate failure for respite. While MAN was undeniably impressive, it simply didn’t achieve the level of gravitas it desired, making its pivotal defeat-must-follow-hope logic seem like an untenable framework for an otherwise realistic portrait of a down-and-out hustler. In the end, the only sliver of hope left to Ahamad is knowingly fleeting and his only way out is to wait for the end and hope for the best.
CHOP SHOP, Bahrani’s sophomore outing was met with equal aplomb and with just cause. With it, Bahrani has distilled the elements that made MAN so potent by following Ale (Alejandro Polenco), a prepubescent adolescent orphan, effectively embracing the story’s fable-like qualities within an otherwise tough-minded frame. Like Ahmad, Ale is a street-smart, bluer-than-blue collar worker with dreams of being his own boss and little opportunity to get ahead by increments larger than the microscopically small. He scrounges and shucks his way through the workday by doing odd jobs at a scummy chop shop in Flushing and sleeps in the garage at night with his sixteen year-old sister (Isamar Gonzales), who fulfills the “woman as the first but not the last false hope” role that Bahrani has used in both of his feature films.
What makes CHOP SHOP more satisfying than MAN PUSH CART isn’t just the slightly larger sliver of a happy ending Bahrani leaves Ale with but rather the way that Bahrani’s use of realism doesn’t feel nearly as tragic with a capital tee as it did with MAN. The plot still conforms somewhat to the predictable expectations of the fleeting nature of Ale’s hopes but it does so relatively more unostentatiously, refusing to completely stack the deck against Ale for the sake of making him a martyr—SPOILER for MAN PUSH CART: did Bahrani really have to kill the kitten off? Obviously he thinks so but frankly that just seemed like a downright cartoonish attempt to emphasize the severity of Ahmad’s hopelessness. While he has very little of it to cling to, hope still flourishes in CHOP SHOP and after everything that Ale goes through to find it, it feels earned.
DIARY OF THE DEAD (2007) Dir: George Romero
With DIARY OF THE DEAD, George Romero does the worst thing that he possibly could in making a movie that uses shaky handheld camerawork: he showed his age. While fledgling auteurs like Jaume Balagueró, David Moreau, Xavier Palud and Matt Reeves have tried their hands at giving contemporary horror a more personal touch with mixed results, Romero’s stab at remaining relevant using nausea-inducing shaky-cam comes off like an impersonal and uninspired polemic against big bad corporations and the all seeing, all-slanted eye of the blogosphere. Romero’s out to hunt “the big media octopus,” as he called it after the film’s advanced screening hosted by the Museum of the Moving Image, except he’s clearly grown older. Romero stands poised to strike with a much weaker voice than the intrepid, coy social satirist that once made the zombie an icon of horror.
DIARY centers on what Romero called “day one” of the zombie crisis, the part of the story where “they (the protagonists) don’t even have names for what’s going on around them.” While information begins to spread about the onset of a mysterious infection that brings the dead back to life, a small group of college students huddle together in the woods to make a low-budget horror film. The group is full of Romero’s usual array of cartoon-characters-as-people, including the rambling, drunk professor (Scott Wentworth), the well-meaning but naïve young filmmaker (Joshua Close), his cynical but pragmatic ex-girlfriend (Michelle Morgan), her supporting current beau (Shawn Roberts), the ditzy blonde (Amy Ciupak Lalonde), the nerdy soon-to-be-dead boy (Joe Dinicol), the flaky guy that you know will be a zombie eventually (Philip Riccio) and the nervous girl whose guilt will make her the first casualty (Tatiana Maslany). There’s not much plot to speak of because as Romero said “story was never important” in his films but when you’re hanging around a bunch of guys that make the yuppies in CLOVERFIELD look down-to-Earth in their quest to find something as vague as a safe place to shack up, it seems pretty damn important.
Romero called the film his “angriest film since ‘NIGHT’ (of the Living Dead)’” and while that’s woefully accurate, it’s also the film’s biggest weakness. He went on to say that he started with the films themes and while that’s not exactly revelatory, it’s certainly disillusioning when the film’s themes are as pat and uninvolving as the dangers of non-involvement and the complicity of the passive watcher message. There’s no satisfying social commentary or joy in DIARY and it all amounts to a critique of the seemingly objective data stream we wade through today to get to “the truth” presented by the internet and mass media in general as well as the notion that people act differently in front of the camera. There’s still plenty of humor scattered throughout but it feels like the awkward jokes your favorite great-uncle inserts in-between awkward rants about the way things were and how things have changed for the worse. Say what you want about poor Brian De Palma’s latest punching bag, but at least REDACTED didn’t try to pass off such non-inflammatory issues as relevant with the help of something as brazen as flesh-eating zombies. The only thing Romero has prepared with DIARY are inchoate leftovers from a party that he started decades ago and was only invited to stick around for today because he used to be fun and relevant but now he’s neither.
Look for my next batch of reviewettes (or reviews lite, if you prefer) tomorrow when I'll be reviewing THE DUCHESS OF LANGEAIS and THE EDGE OF HEAVEN.
