The Asphalt Jungle

The Best of 2009 - #1

February 21st, 2010 by Raj Ranade

Raj picks a model of cinematic efficiency while Fareed picks four films with a total running time of 532 minutes.

Raj:

The Hurt Locker (dir. by Kathryn Bigelow) - The pitfall of the day-by-day listing approach that we tried here is that your ideal list also happens to change day-by-day. In retrospect, I find it nearly impossible to convince myself that “Summer Hours” isn’t the best film of the year. Don’t take that as a criticism of “The Hurt Locker” in any way, though – the most accomplished work of art regarding the Iraq War to date is a brilliant film that deserves every bit of the effusive acclaim that has come its way. This is particularly true in light of the film’s criminally stupid botched release plan, which hid the year’s most effective action film away from mainstream audiences and left it to elderly art-house patrons without any stomach for the film’s ample adrenaline. Like Jacques Audiard, Kathryn Bigelow has effectively come of nowhere (aside from Point Break, I guess) and produced a complete masterpiece, which makes the film that much more impressive.

I could go into generalities about what makes this film so effective, but I think it’s even more effective just to discuss the brilliance of the opening scene, which isn’t even the peak of the film (but does happen to be readily available for your viewing pleasure on Hulu). We open with a shot of a remote vehicle traversing rocky terrain - we know it’s Iraq, but it does look like it could be the Mars rover for all we know - this impression of Iraq as a alien wasteland is reinforced by the spacesuit stylings of the protective bomb gear later. Next, soldiers clear out civilians and establish a perimeter as Movie Star Guy Pearce works with other bomb techs to control the electronic rover, bantering with easy familiarity that indicates not only the group’s tight-knit nature but the way that a terrifying situation has become mundane. There’s a throwaway insert shot where a civilian in a white shirt slips past perimeter guards amidst general disarray.

An overhead shot of the techs is next - someone is watching, and the tension starts to build. More inserts of onlookers as the rover drives along and its wheel snaps, which results in Pearce deciding to walk out to the bomb in his protective suit - the film’s first breach of standard protocol. More aerial shots - which not only establish the tension of the unseen observer but establish without a doubt the scene’s geography in thorough detail. Bursts of noise pepper the soundtrack as Pearce walks and his subordinates are approached by a purportedly friendly Iraqi speaking English.

The scene is building with intense and ominous foreboding, but a light joke between the two subordinate soldiers briefly distracts us, until the younger soldier notices something - represented as a POV shot in video instead of film. What the man has noticed is an Iraqi with a phone - the same Iraqi that slipped past guards earlier - and the soldiers run towards the man trying to stop him and the soundtrack starts ringing and Pearce is running and the Iraqi is not responding and the bomb hits. In slow-motion shots, dirt starts to float - we have an implosion here, not an explosion, as well as the slow-motion realization of tragedy coming, which is something that anyone who’s been in a car crash is familiar with. When Pearce dies, he’s smooshed on the inside of his undamaged suit.

To sum up, within 7 minutes, we have Iraq as stylized metaphor, the subversion of surviving Movie Star norms as a disorientation for the audience, a meticulously laid-out and consistent action environment, throwaway shots as seeds for later action, video versus film as subjective versus objective experience, brilliant control of ebbing and flowing momentum, and a metaphor encapsulating the entire film - war is as likely to kill you from the inside as it is from the outside. None of this, of course, is explained with words.

The reason I’ve gone into such excruciating detail here is not because the opening is an extraordinary setpiece, but because it is in fact characteristic of the attention and care provided to every frame of this film. You’ll be hard-pressed to come up with another recent action film that is anywhere near this film’s weight class - sloppy modern action directors tend to be more concerned with sensation and loud noise than they are with any type of coherence, spatial awareness, or meaning.

And there’s the thing - every action in this film tells us something about the film’s people or situations, far more than the words ever do. Through action in the film, we receive a discourse on what is and isn’t effective military leadership, how external military contractors in Iraq have a Wild West lawlessness unbound by protocol, how the American soldier at even his most well-meaning can be completely oblivious to the most basic facts of Iraqi culture, how men truly bond and develop unit cohesion, the disconnect between psychological and political rhetoric, and most obviously how war really is a poisonous soul-killing drug. (By the way, you tell me if that bullshit about this being a non-political film sounds true).

I could go on about Jeremy Renner’s brilliant performance, the intricate and impressive soundtrack, the searing cinematography, the devastating coda, and more, but I’ll end with this - as a critic (pretension alert), I’ve always considered myself a formalist, and there aren’t many films that are as well put together formally as this one. That this technical brilliance is to used to create a nuanced, sensitive portrait of one of the most important historical events of our generation simply cements the film’s status as the (second) best film of the year.

Fareed:

Love Exposure (dir. by Sion Sono) - Sion Sono’s “Love Exposure” is a film that seems destined for failure. After all, what filmmaker in their right mind would attempt to craft a four-hour movie about a high school voyeur? When I first saw the film last July, the skepticism in the theater was palpable. By the time the 237 minute opus was over, and the packed audience burst forth with applause, it was clear that Sion Sono made the right move.  World cinema is a better place thanks to Sono’s audacious decision to ignore all common sense and go forward with his epic vision. He has created an exhilarating production that viciously indicts present-day Japan while making a convincing case for the merits of the four-hour narrative film.

Even the main arc of the hero contains glimpses of the work’s ever-present audacity thanks to its shocking blend of religion and the perverse. The sprawling film focuses on Yu Honda, a Catholic who lives a quiet life of pious worship. When his widowed father turned Catholic priest is left brokenhearted by a promiscuous member of his flock, he suddenly demands that Yu Honda live a life of sin. Never one to disappoint his beloved dad, the formerly pure Yu Honda gleefully devotes himself to all manner of perversity becoming the undisputed master of the panty shot. On his path to perverse dominance, the high schooler runs into Yoko and falls in love. His sweeping amorous intentions manifest themselves in his first ever erection! Taking these physical changes as a sign from above, Yu Honda commits himself to completely winning her over, even if that means overcoming her adoration for his transvestite alter-ego Madame Scorpion and facing down a malevolent Christian cult.

Precisely because of the freedom allowed by the four-hour format, the film brims with a surprising narrative fluidity. The film often adjusts its gaze away from Yu Honda so that he appears to be little more than a cog in a gigantic machine. His true love Yoko has her own segment that poignantly captures the production’s winning playfulness. Describing a time before she was enlightened by the attractive ways of Jesus, the character admits that she was, “just some bitch who fell down a lot.” Juxtaposed against this confession are many shots of a taciturn Yoko trudging through Tokyo streets and tumbling down - an absurd but salient view of alienation. While the peripheral characters all have an over-the-top dimension, they are all sharply defined.

Matching this narrative complexity, the filmmaker’s creativity seems unbridled as he constructs a unique hyper-reality defined by both innocent and sometimes dark desires. He captures Yu Honda’s panty snapping adventures with the gonzo energy of an anime. The presentation style of such forays perfectly evokes the thrill of voyeurism. As Honda begins to rise, sometimes very literally, the film forces the viewer to viscerally feel his every success. As the film’s view of a world gone mad widens ever further, Sono adopts an appropriately manic and free-wheeling visual style.

Perhaps the greatest plaudit that can be given to Sono’s on a technical level is that the four-hour film feels like a 90 minute one. Much of the first half of the film has an incredible dramatic tension as all the events depicted feature a timer that counts down to a miracle in Yu Honda’s life. Later scenes, dwell on the sometimes despondent conversations between a desperate Yu Honda and a distant Yoko thus emphasizing the chasm between romantic dreams and reality. Sono has made a film of both unmatched editorial control and variation where every aesthetic decision, no matter how surprising, is calculated to inject the narrative with an engrossing emotional edge.

What has stayed with me in the many months (and the hundreds of movies) since I first encountered “Love Exposure” was the intellectually rich social commentary that underpins this unique love story. To quote my initial review: “Beyond its visceral qualities, “Love Exposure” has a thematic complexity rarely reached in popular cinema delivering a complex view of today’s Japanese society. In the film’s comedy, it examines the odd perversity of Japanese popular culture that eschews the explicit for the taboo. When a porn company forces the hero to meet with the fellow outsiders that worship his every move, the film becomes a series of confessionals with increasingly deranged characters. Strikingly these figures expound upon of obsessions that are less explicitly sexual and more innocently fetishistic including interests in feet as well as nurses and doctors. Such a hilarious scene succinctly highlights a society That continues to reconstitute the erotic. The film’s more subversive focus on Catholicism and a fringe Christian cult brings to light a culture haunted by its own unstable identity. While Love Exposure is often humorously exaggerated, its portrait of contemporary Japan is devastatingly bleak.”

Sono has long used genre confines to ponder a Japanese society without a rudder. His horror flick “Suicide Club” examines the horrors of a groupthink mentality, when the individual becomes totally subsumed by the Internet collective. The later film “Noriko’s Dinner Table” peered into the recent rent-a-family phenomenon to illuminate the driving artifice present within even the vaunted institution of the family.   Sono, however, only gets a real opportunity to frame the many fissures in today’s Japan on a four-hour canvas unconstrained by genre limitations and conventional pacing demands. The very aesthetic richness and dynamism of “Love Exposure” crystallizes a Japan without a sense of self and hints at the sheer terror brought on by cultural limbo.

Researching this piece, I found that Sono received a “Don Quixote” prize for one of his earlier films. How fitting that his most recent production exposes the extent of his quixotic vision and all-encompassing ambition. “Love Exposure” represents a rare chance to completely immerse oneself into a visionary’s nightmarish dream made cinematic, and the result is a work of art quite unlike anything ever put to film.

Red Riding Trilogy: 1974, 1980, 1983 (dir. by Julian Jarrold, James Marsh, and Anand Tucker) - In the spirit of celebrating the long running time, I feel it necessary to cite the epic British crime film trilogy “Red Riding.”  Having seen the films after I finished compiling the top 10 list, I’m still not sure where this fits in the final tally; however, I can already confidently say that this rich 295 minute series can certainly stand next to the films on this list.

Like “Love Exposure,” these films deserves your attention. Unlike “Love Exposure “, which unfortunately may not actually receive an American theatrical release, you will likely be able to see “Red Riding” very shortly since the film is scheduled to be released this month. Whereas the previously discussed uber-long production seemed driven by the question “what is Japan?” this crime drama ambitiously attempts to answer another query, “what is noir?”

To gain a thorough grasp of the genre’s capacities, the trilogy’s three separate segments are directed by different filmmakers. Yet the genius of the “Red Riding” experience is that three very different mysteries take place within the same downtrodden, industrial Yorkshire in the north of England. The cohesive narrative structure permits the film to boldly examine different types of noir from the expressionistic, the police procedural, and even the supernatural. The first from the view of a naïve journalist brushing up against police corruption, the second from that of a detective dealing with the hell of police bureaucracy, and the last from that of a policeman in search for redemption . Their visual styles are just as dynamic as the stories they tell ranging from the bleakly sumptuous to the coolly restrained. While different artistic visions motivate each chapter, they are unified by the strength and confidence of their execution.

These different scenarios create a rich noir world of incomparable complexity and spark an appreciation of the many tantalizing possibilities of this almost indefinable cinematic genre. At one point, a brutal interrogator points towards the overcast landscape of the Yorkshire moors, which the out of focus perspective effectively transforms into a gray void, and screams, “You see that?! That’s the NORTH, where we do what we want!” It is a haunting moment that serves as a potent visual metaphor for the production’s blisteringly intelligent thesis about film noir. Every screenwriter, filmmaker, and actor involved understands that while noir is famous for its black-and-white, high contrast visuals, it is the genre that can best explore the unnerving shades of gray in humanity. Simply put, “Red Riding” is one of the sharpest deconstructions of noir ever created. This and “Love Exposure” will transform your conceptions about running time.

Entry Filed under: Best of 2009