Site Presented By
Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
The films you probably missed -- but shouldn't! This month: The Jarmusch-Lynch problem, Iceland's "Noi," Russia's "The Return," "Osama" director Siddiq Barmak on his unlikely hit, and zombie flicks go back to basics.
Mar 25, 2004 | The Kevin Bacon of Iceland and a Creepy Russian Dad
So I have this theory, pretty much untested, that all arty, indie-type films made in the last 15 years or so in America and Western Europe fall into one of two categories: Jim Jarmusch or David Lynch. Wes Anderson is a Jarmusch filmmaker; P.T. Anderson is more Lynch. Quentin Tarantino? Lynch on really high-grade coke. Some movies can be a little of both, like Spike Jonze's "Adaptation" or everything the Coen brothers have ever made, but even there it's possible to categorize. "The Big Lebowski" is more David Lynch, in that its dominant strain is sweet-tempered wackiness; "The Man Who Wasn't There" (aka "The Movie You Didn't See") is more Jarmusch, in that its dominant strain is impenetrable ennui.
Let's move on, before you point out that a lot of earnest, semi-arty flicks veer more toward the John Cassavetes and/or John Sayles category ("In the Bedroom," "You Can Count on Me"), or that the most important grandfather figure in all of Western art cinema might be the late Luis Buñuel, or that the Dogme movement is best described as a system for making imitation Ingmar Bergman films. It's all true, but you're distracting me.
My point is that at a lower level of production (and fame) than most of the examples I have mentioned so far, at the genuine grassroots of filmmaking where ambitious young artists try to find a foothold in the biz, the influence of Jarmusch and Lynch -- with their quirky, disaffected responses to modernity, their individual versions of early-'80s bohemian angst -- is tremendous. Unfortunately, in perhaps four out of five cases (again, my methods are ruthlessly unscientific), this influence pans out as nothing more than atmosphere and mood, as a film that's vague and rootless (Jarmusch) or recklessly goofy (Lynch) to no clear purpose.
Consider two of this season's best-regarded imports, Dagur Kári's "Nói" and Andrei Zvyagintsev's "The Return." The former (which just opened in New York and will gradually make its way elsewhere) is a tale of an unhappy teenager in goofy clothes trapped in a remote Icelandic town nestled under a huge glacier. It features an overweight bookseller in one of those "NEW YORK FUCKING CITY" T-shirts, a cute girl who rarely speaks and a karaoke version of Elvis Presley's embarrassing yet irresistible late hit "In the Ghetto." It's winsome. It's dark. It's Jarmusch all the way.
The title character is played by a French-Icelandic actor named Tómas Lemarquis, who happens to be an albino. He skulks around his ice-bound village in a sky-blue Members Only jacket and a knit cap, wearing a half-vulnerable sneer that makes him look like a starved, hairless version of the younger Kevin Bacon. Even through the cryptic fragments of Kári's script, Lemarquis makes Nói seem like a likable, bright and hopelessly unmotivated kid. He knows how to jimmy the slot machine at the gas station for pocket money, he cuts school virtually every day, and he gets along with his hapless, drunken, cab-driving father about as well as could be expected.
"Nói" has a lot going for it. The empty, eerie scenery of this tiny village, with its permafrost streets and dowdy mobile homes, is distinctively rendered; you'll leave the theater feeling snowblind. The acting is very good, in that noncommittal art-movie way. It's pretty funny in a grim, Björk-ish Icelandic manner; the sequence in which Nói tries to rob the town bank and then escape in a stolen American car is a dry, slow-motion parody of crime-movie conventions. It has a drifty, spacey, cool soundtrack of exactly the kind you'd expect. (Like seemingly all other young Icelanders, Kári is a musician as well as a filmmaker. I'm sure he's opening a gallery soon, or marrying an ex-lesbian pop singer or something.)
So this is exactly the kind of movie that winds up playing every film festival in the known world. (It won a major award at the Transylvanian Film Festival in Romania, and no, I couldn't make that up.) It moseys through your consciousness in its depressed, can-kicking way, always verging on irony but mostly feeling sad instead, before exiting at the other end with a big allegorical flourish that leaves nothing resolved and few traces behind. I liked it OK, but it's more like a painting or a piece of ambient music -- or, pardon the expression, a "head space" -- than a movie.
"The Return" (which has been open in New York and California for a few weeks and should be reaching wider release) is also pretty head-spacey, but in a quite different and -- to me, anyway -- more effective way. This would be a Jarmusch film too, except that it's Russian, and that changes the equation significantly. Russian movies are always symbolic in character until proven otherwise, and they can almost never be proven otherwise. Zvyagintsev's first scene features a boy who goes swimming at a beach (on the ocean or a lake, we can't tell) with a bunch of friends, but becomes too frightened to jump off the wooden diving platform and sits up there shivering in the evening wind until his mother comes to fetch him.
It's a completely naturalistic scene, or nearly so, like the rest of the film. But it's also like a dream, in that it's virtually overrun with primal symbolism -- and that's like the rest of the film, too. The boy is Ivan (Ivan Dobronravov), around 12, who lives with his older brother Andrei (Vladimir Garin), one of the boys who abandoned him on the platform, and their laconic blond mother (Natalya Vdovina) in a decrepit, half-abandoned housing project. We don't know where in Russia we are, or what year it is. (Probably Siberia and probably now, but it doesn't really matter.) Neither the mother nor the father (Konstantin Lavronenko) -- who abruptly appears after a long absence -- are named. Although other people are occasionally seen, the towns and countryside alike seem largely depopulated, as if by war or disaster.
Where has Dad been since Andrei and Ivan were small children? They ask but are not told. (We may be in a better position to guess.) He's a father of a familiar flesh-and-blood type -- the masculine, outdoorsy, quick-to-anger version. His behavior is recognizably Dad-like, given as he is to running unexplained errands involving unexplained packages and checking out the asses of overly made-up women in tight skirts. But when Andrei and Ivan first see him, asleep in Mom's bed, with the sheet hugging his masculine endowment and his arms thrown out to the side, looking for all the world like a medieval Christ in agony, you may start to wonder things, things like: What the hell is really going on in this movie?
I'm not telling, except to say that the long and eventful fishing trip Dad drags the boys on is simultaneously a very real voyage through the Russian wilderness and also, like, a Jungian trip, man. What's so miraculous about "The Return" is that the story completely works on both levels. The dampness, loneliness, fear and boredom of the journey are tangible, as is the volatile mixture of love and hate the boys feel for this stranger who abandoned them and now expects their respect and obedience. When Ivan once again finds himself atop a wooden tower, weeping and terrified, the event has all the devastating force of a dream that has ripped its way into the waking world. Where "Nói" drifts listlessly through your consciousness, too cool to say anything or actually make an impression, "The Return" will leave indelible marks.
