Lessons of Darkness

In the City of Sylvia (2008): B+

In the City of Sylvia would be trying if not for the confidence, grace and subtlety with which José Luis Guerín handles his deliberately open-ended material. In Strasbourg, artist Él (Xavier Lafitte) struggles to find inspiration in his cramped bedroom, eventually moving outside to a café where he intently studies the faces and forms – mostly female – that surround him. Employing next to no dialogue, Guerín conveys a sense of being gripped by consuming yearning, which, during a discussion on a sunlit midday train, is revealed to be that Él wishes to find the woman named Sylvia whom he met six years earlier in a nearby bar. This information certainly lends some basic meaning to the long stretches in which Él stares at women’s necks, hands and smiling mouths, as well as the prolonged sequence where he tracks an attractive female (Pilar López de Ayala) through the streets of Strasbourg while meekly calling out “Sylvia.” Yet the specific object of his obsession is rather secondary, as Guerín’s deft, supple compositions – in which background faces appear to be engaged in conversation with unrelated foreground ones, reflections morph and disappear like fleeting apparitions, and the camera patiently lingers on the disparate countenances of the city’s inhabitants – and similarly sensual non-diegetic soundscape express the filmmaker’s primary concerns (memory, desire, the act of (cinematic) watching) in pure visual/aural terms. In the City of Sylvia is entrancing and, more strikingly, engaging, its obliqueness inducing constant audience supposition and exploration. And if its fill-in-the-blanks vagueness ultimately causes the film, like a fleeting daydream, to slightly dissipate in one’s mind and heart shortly after its conclusion, such elusiveness doesn’t preclude one’s in-the-moment sensory experience from being bracing.

Four More

So about all those unpublished reviews I referred to in Friday night's link post...here are four of them, hot off the Interweb.

This Friday:
The Reader (Slant magazine)
What Doesn't Kill You (Slant magazine)
Nothing Like the Holidays (Slant magazine)
Dark Streets (Slant magazine)

Doubt (2008): B-

John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt is, as you might assume, about the titular condition, as well as about its counterpoint Certainty, two big themes that the Pulitzer Prize-winning play-turned-film treats with intelligence and subtlety if not, ultimately, great insightfulness. As on the stage, Shanley’s story is a battle between Brooklyn Catholic school principal Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Meryl Streep), an ascetic nun whose disdain for 1964’s modern notions is so extreme that it includes a hatred of hair clips and ballpoint pens, and Father Brendan Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a man of the cloth who believes the clergy are no better than the congregation and that compassion should guide the church. Driven by the suggestions of timid, acquiescing Sister James (Amy Adams), Sister Aloysius comes to think that Flynn is engaged in a sexually inappropriate relationship with the school’s first African-American student, Donald Muller (Joseph Foster), a suspicion that Shanley depicts as being partly reasonable (given a few strange turns of events) and partly the byproduct of her blind, intolerant hatred for what the progressive Flynn represents. Aside from awkward, often ill-fitting tilted camera angles, the writer/director adapts his stagey work with a modicum of aesthetic theatricality, instead handling his material’s series of tense philosophical debates about conviction and justice with a straightforwardness that places the focus squarely on his performers. The three leads, as well as Viola Davis as Donald’s mother, are all solid, with a ferocious Streep by and large avoiding turning the intimidating Aloysius into a caricature and Hoffman repeatedly lacing quiet, emotional expressions with ambiguousness. Still, Doubt works so diligently at setting up a scenario where truth can’t be definitively ascertained that its concluding argument about the universality (and reasonableness) of doubt – and the danger of rigid conviction – feels somewhat artificially inviolable, the filmmaker stacking the deck in favor of uncertainty to a degree that makes his final argument feel too easy. 

An Un- Embargoed Three

Though I've been writing like crazy, most of my recent reviews have yet to see the light of day thanks to studio-mandated embargoes that prevent publication until the week of release. Thus, I only have three new reviews for this Friday, with more to come soon, including Doubt and In the City of Sylvia arriving later this weekend, and other "Revolutionary" and "Curious" Oscar hopefuls appearing sometime after that...

Now Playing:
Punisher: War Zone (Slant magazine)
The Black Balloon (Slant magazine)
Nobel Son (Slant magazine)