Lessons of Darkness

Secret Sunshine (2007): A-

An exemplary examination of coping that expands to entail questions of morality, absolution and faith, Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine is a masterwork of incisive melodrama. Opening to a shot of a clear blue sky that’s ultimately juxtaposed by a haunting image of a garbage-strewn dirt patch, Lee’s film concerns Shin-ae (Cannes best actress winner Jeon Do-yeon), who with her young son Jun (Seon Jeong-yeob) moves from Seoul to her late husband’s hometown of Miryang, which (per her deceased spouse’s nickname for the town) she hopes will be her own rejuvenating ray of “secret sunshine.” There, she finds a semi-unwanted friend in a clingy mechanic (Song Kang-ho) whose desire to start a romance isn’t reciprocated by Shin-ae, as well as the same sort of judgmental nastiness from locals that’s exuded by the brother (and, by extension, family) she left behind. Nonetheless, more unsettling than any social friction during the story’s early, relatively tranquil act are the subtle cracks that emerge in Shin-ae’s placid façade, be it an awkwardly presumptuous encounter with a storeowner or interactions with Jun – scary games of hide-and-seek, or mimicry of their lost father/husband’s snoring habits – that verge on the creepily unhealthy.

Lee treats Shin-ae and Jun’s rapport with an attentive empathy that culminates with the boy’s classroom public-speaking presentation, a moment of such happiness that the subsequent tragedy (not to be explicitly discussed here, but spoiler warnings ahead) cuts like a knife. From there, Secret Sunshine charts Shin-ae’s unbearable grief and embrace (after early dismissals) of a Christian God whose evangelical disciples blindly preach forgiveness, though once an attempt by Shin-ae to grant amnesty to an inmate backfires – in an absolutely devastating scene of stunned emotional and psychological swings – the grieving woman then instigates a war with the almighty. That conflict plays out via vindictive acts that would seem contrived if not for the material’s consistent believability in terms of moment-to-moment internal and external reactions. Lee wisely sublimates stylistic showmanship in favor of fixating on Do-yeon, whose lead performance is one of vivid, heartbreaking crisis wrought from not only loss but the unfulfilling emptiness that comes from her attempts to both deny and confront her reality. Do-yeon’s turn is the epicenter of what proves to be a complex, scathing and open-ended inquiry into the nature of religious belief and, more fundamentally still, the knotty relationship between everyday morality and higher-power piety, a tale told with subtlety and candor, compassion and rawness, grace and horror.

Our Beloved Month of August (2010): B

Part fictional drama, part documentary, part concert film – Our Beloved Month of August doesn’t so much blend disparate genres as collapse them into a uniquely evocative collage, albeit one that remains something of a detached formal exercise. The first half of Miguel Gomes’ sophomore effort (after 2003’s The Face You Deserve) purports to be a non-fiction portrait of rural Portugal shot while Gomes waits to cast an upcoming feature project. Sequences of religious ritual and everyday life are stitched together with graceful intrigue, the film flitting in and out of its various subjects’ tales – be it an accident-prone lifeguard or a fire warden – as well as performance footage of various local bands. At the midway point, however, the aforementioned fictional feature suddenly kicks into gear, starring many of the people spied in the first half, albeit now “playing” different characters. This scripted saga involves a band comprised of family members whose lives are defined by romantic tensions, incest, and tales of alien abduction, and it pushes Our Beloved Month of August into an indefinable realm where questions of reality and performance, authenticity and artifice are constantly at play. Throughout, Gomes delivers one striking image after another, from human shadows dancing across environmental structures, to young lovers superimposed over a landscape seen through binoculars, to a symbolic intro of a fox stalking a chicken coop. A playful coda, in which the director discusses mysterious non-diegetic music with his sound technician, hilariously addresses his underlying concerns. Yet as Gomes is more interested in situating one in the space between fiction and non-fiction than he is in eliciting emotional engagement, his film – a tribute to the Portuguese landscape, to music as a communicative device, and to the enigma of cinematic storytelling – ultimately proves an uneven collection of often-mesmeric moments.

Inside Job (2010): B+

Inside Job doesn’t elucidate much about the 2008 American (and subsequent global) economic collapse that couldn’t have been gleaned from regular newspaper reading over the past two years. That simply means, however, that Charles Ferguson’s documentary is merely an exhaustively infuriating recap of the causes and effects of our country’s three decade-commitment to financial deregulation. As in No End in Sight, Ferguson’s subject is political but his approach is refreshingly apolitical, detailing without party bias the way in which Ronald Reagan’s decision to limit oversight on Wall Street and commercial banking slowly but surely led to systemic financial corruption. Ferguson’s documentary damns through thoroughness, detailing not only the rise of derivatives and similar risky products, but also banks’ efforts to simultaneously promote and bet against dodgy subprime mortgages and securities, a bonus structure that encouraged dicey decision-making for short-term gains, the habitual movement of players between the private and governmental realms, and a credit-rating and securities industry in collusion with the very companies they were supposedly policing. That the director’s non-fiction template is standard-issue – his format intersperses talking-head interviews with informative graphs and pie charts, all tethered together by clear-cut Matt Damon narration – may decrease the film’s glitziness. Still, the coherence and sobriety of this style bolsters its indictment, which is chockablock with confrontational chitchats with conflict-of-interest-flaunting academics (during part of a larger censure of university economics professors also seen to be in the pocket of the financial sector) and former Treasury and Federal Reserve bigwigs. Condemning a system that ran – and is still freely running – amok, Inside Job makes one mad as hell just by clearly and comprehensively making its case.

I Love You Phillip Morris (2010): B

With uneven if generally charming results, Bad Santa writers Glenn Ficarra and John Requa’s directorial debut I Love You Phillip Morris straddles the fine line between outrageous farce and heartfelt romance. Based on a true story so unbelievable that the intro credits must restate the fact that “it really did” happen, the film charts the unlikely affair between habitual con man Steven (Jim Carrey) and sweet boy-toy Phillip (Ewan McGregor) while in prison. Steven is in the clink for insurance fraud scams pulled after he abandoned his religious wife and daughter for a luxurious homo Florida lifestyle, which drove him to crime because, as he quickly realizes, “being gay is really expensive.” Despite a life defined by lies to himself and others, Steven genuinely falls for the honest Phillip, and in a surprising twist, Ficarra and Requa don’t treat their protagonists’ super-squishy feelings for each other as a crass joke, but as authentic emotions to be treated with respect. That attitude makes I Love You Phillip Morris more than just a bit of crime-caper silliness, albeit not that much more, since the writer/directors frequently balance their earnest portrait of Steven and Phillip’s romance with lots of ribald gay-related humor (blowjobs figure prominently) and Steven’s incessant scamming, which comes to involve multiple prison breaks, an accounting swindle with a medical company, and a fake AIDS diagnosis. Given that its all in service of making his partner happy, Steven’s deceitfulness is treated as a manifestation of his amour, but that doesn’t alter the fact that Steven’s schemes are often more clever than laugh-out-loud funny, and lacking the true impropriety of Bad Santa’s best bits. Consequently, the film never quite establishes a consistent sleazy-and-sweet tone, although it is bolstered by a sterling Jim Carrey performance that comically and sincerely captures the exuberant madness of love.

Ne Change Rien (2010): B

Creative inspiration springs forth from endless repetition in Ne Change Rien, Pedro Costa’s non-fiction portrait of French singer/actress Jeanne Balibar. Shooting in luscious black and white and long, static takes, Costa opens on Balibar singing a sultry version of Kris Jensen’s “Torture” on stage before segueing to the recording studio, where endless rehearsals of the same few bars of a single song capture the artistic process in all its mundanity. Balibar’s vocal preparations for a forthcoming opera also fill out this reverential, non-chronological tribute to the toil that lies behind great performance, with the film interested in little more than intently gazing upon its deeply engaged subject. Ne Change Rien deliberately flirts with sleep-inducing sluggishness, trying its audience’s patience – and their interest in Balibar and her work – by fixating on the chanteuse’s over-and-over-again practices perfecting the ins and outs of a chorus or melody with her accompanying musicians. Nonetheless, the doc’s rigorousness can also be enthralling, thanks not only to Balibar's sumptuously smoky voice and sultry performances (her focused, passionate, exhausted countenance half-hidden in striking chiaroscuro), but also to accompanying visuals that have a dreamy, nightclub-inviting gorgeousness. Beautiful and somnambulistic, electric and enervating, it’s a film dreamily in love with the equally inspiring and tedious work of art.

White Material (2010): B+

A visually ravishing, structurally beguiling portrait of post-colonial race-conflict as a hallucinatory apocalyptic dream, White Material finds Claire Denis operating in a somewhat more abstract mode than her prior 35 Shots of Rum. Working from a Marie N’Diaye script, Denis sets her tale in an anonymous African nation at an indeterminate time, a vagueness that’s strikingly complemented by a fixation on tactile details – of smoke billowing from houses, coffee beans being harvested and stomped by hands and feet, bodies in close-up motion and stasis, and faces in repose and wracked by anxiety. Similarly, the director jumbles her story’s chronology to create a sense of reality coming unhinged, even as her fundamental tale remains straightforward, focusing on white French coffee plantation owner Maria (Isabelle Huppert) as she tries to keep her business running while a civil war breaks out between the country’s military and a murderous rebel force intent on eradicating the nation’s Caucasians (aka “white element”). Irrationality leads to collapse and/or insanity at every turn, not just in the case of Maria’s foolish refusal to flee the country (instead, she slanders her native France and endeavors to hire new workers) and decision to house a rebel leader known as The Boxer (Isaach De Bankolé), but also in the disintegration of her clan. As the rugged land succumbs to brutality, Maria’s ex-husband André (Christopher Lambert) attempts to sell the family business behind Maria’s back, her father-in-law (Michel Subor) aimlessly wanders about the property, and her layabout son Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle) responds to an assault by two black kids by shaving his head and going wannabe-rebel native. Madness born from colonial racial dynamics spreads like a virus, infecting all. It’s a rather simple socio-political set-up, yet one made infinitely more haunting by the filmmaker’s impressionistic aesthetics (courtesy of gorgeous camerawork by cinematographer Yves Cape and an unsettling Tindersticks score). Whether in the sight of machete-wielding adolescent soldiers emerging from hillside trees, or Huppert’s tightly wound countenance, barely able to bottle up her underlying grief, rage and fear, Denis’ evocative direction lends this saga of humanity teetering on the brink of collapse a ghastly splendor.

Hideaway (2010): B+

An unconvincing ending doesn’t derail the otherwise nuanced complexity of Hideaway, François Ozon’s latest investigation of female alienation, sexuality and maternity. Ozon’s film begins with junkie Mousse (Isabelle Carré) passed out in her drug-den apartment as her boyfriend Louis (Melvil Poupaud) buys some smack, shoots up, and drifts off to the hereafter. While mourning her lost love, Mousse discovers she’s pregnant with his child, and – out of curiosity, faithfulness to Louis, and defiance to Louis’ mother, who coldly suggests abortion – decides to keep the kid, clean up and retreat to a beachside house. There, she strikes up an unlikely friendship with Louis’ gay brother Paul (Louis-Ronan Choisy), which proceeds at such an unhurried pace, and with such a wealth of casually dropped details about their backstories, that the somewhat contrived nature of their encounter and ensuing bond is largely mitigated. Throughout, Ozon refuses to sentimentalize Mousse’s impending pregnancy – she seems alternately loving and aloof, warm and hard, thanks in large part to a magnetic performance by Carré that, in terms of outlook and temperament, seems to shift on a dime. A standout encounter between Mousse and a beach-walking stranger exemplifies the simultaneously hopeful and terrifying nature of forthcoming motherhood. It’s a mood Hideaway can’t quite carry through to its finale, which attempts to stay true to Mousse’s confusion (over herself, and her unborn baby) in a way that’s both predictable and implausible. Yet before that late misstep, Ozon’s latest casts a moderately enthralling spell, characterized as it is by the writer/director’s eroticized fixation on faces and bodies, and dedicated as it is (and its sterling lead turns are) to psychological and emotional uncertainty.