Howl

For example, there are wearying courtroom scenes, heavy on exposition, with tricked out actors hamming it up in costumes borrowed from the Mad Men set; black-and-white scenes of “the past,” with James Franco as Ginsberg reciting Howl aloud to the black-bereted habitués of a Beat café; and, most regrettably, a neo-psychedelic cartoon version of the poem intercut throughout. Both the film, and the poem itself, are ruined by the literal, and to my eye, crude animations. The Simpsons episode built around Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven was wittier and visually more inventive.

The too pretty Franco as Ginsberg is as miscast as Gwyneth Paltrow was in Sylvia (2003). (Paltrow mistakenly played Sylvia Plath’s violent despair as whining petulance. It’s no wonder the filmmakers weren’t given permission to quote from any of her poetry.) Here, Franco imitates the rhythms of Ginsberg’s speaking voice, but is unable to plumb any emotion from the poem’s depths. At this point in his career, it’s time for Franco to play a distressed Lothario, like Binx, the protagonist of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, and move away from these circumspect portrayals of gay men (see also Milk (2008)).

By what means then, could a filmmaker invent a visual language to complement, and illuminate, the complexities of an author’s life and work? I have yet to see better examples than Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career (1979) and Jane Campion’s An Angel at My Table (1990). Judy Davis, at the age of 24, delivered an audacious performance as Sybylla Melvyn, a young woman who defies her family, and the conventions of an early 20th century society, by choosing to live an independent life as a writer, instead of becoming a wife. Sybylla could have come across as merely selfish and uncompromising, but Davis also revealed the character’s doubts and fears. From the changes in her breathing and the cracks in her voice, to her stiff or slack body posture, you can feel her bristling from too many constraints. The film’s setting, in the untamed Australian outback, seems to reflect the condition of her soul. And, as the story progresses, it becomes clear that only through her writing will she find any peace of mind.

My Brilliant Career suggested that you’d need Sybylla’s indomitable will to become a writer. An Angel at My Table demonstrated something else entirely. When, as a girl, the New Zealand writer Janet Frame walks up to the entrance of a library for the first time, she looks up, as if to Heaven, and sees the capitalized word “ATHENAEUM” high and luminous above her. Despite a paralyzing sense of self-consciousness, several family tragedies, and the pains of suffering from mental illness, Frame’s eventual salvation comes through the reading and writing of books. In both movies, finding a writer’s voice–not the love of a man–is the moral of the story. As the films end, we hear these women in voice-overs, calm and assured, their intellects engaged and imagining. Armstrong and Campion are on to something: they created memorable films by working from the inside out. Howl, on the other hand, reduces the mythology behind an incendiary poem to a tired set of legal proceedings, and never gets beneath its high-gloss surface.

Having a Coke With You

If someone happens to make another Ginsberg film, the way two successive Truman Capote films were made in 2005 (Capote) and 2006 (Infamous), then why not start with the less sensational poem “Kaddish,” which begins: “Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on/the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.” This understated and lovingly detailed elegy to his mother offers a much clearer glimpse inside the soul of Ginsberg than anything on display in this misconceived movie. Otherwise, I’d scrap the idea altogether and start fresh with a life of Frank O’Hara. My working title: Having a Coke with You.

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In fact, it is their countryman, Francis Veber, who writes and directs amusing but simplistic farces like The Valet (La doublure, 2006) and The Dinner Game (Le diner de cons, 1998), which has recently been remade as Dinner for Schmucks, starring Steve Carrell and Paul Rudd. The idea of an American studio attempting to remake the sophisticated and multi-layered films of Jaoui and Bacri seems like an act of folly; or, a rather fitting idea for a Jaoui and Bacri film. Each one of their scripts is Pirandellian in that they all feature a story within a story: actors performing in a play; singers rehearsing for a concert; subjects being interviewed for a documentary. As a result, the presence of artists at work expertly establishes the fourth wall, and the filmmakers’s witty, invented world becomes wonderfully, and often absurdly, alive. But the most rewarding aspect of their work thus far has been the pageant-like display of their characters’s many foibles – the sympathetic ones that make them vulnerable, alongside the ugly ones that reveal egotism and vanity.

As an actor, Jean-Pierre Bacri has taken on the role of the buffoon with great gusto. The business executive he plays in The Taste of Others sports a mustache like that of a morose walrus. He embodies melancholy, and, with that shadowy droop on his upper lip, elevates the lovelorn sulk into a work of living portraiture. In Look at Me, he becomes a famous and utterly self-absorbed author, who is unable to pay close attention to the emotional needs of his family. In both films, he is a man with money, influence and power. Let it Rain gives Bacri the opportunity to continue with his on screen fatuousness, but this time it is Jaoui’s character whose professional status outranks his, as well as everyone else’s.

As an actress, Agnés Jaoui’s pale, rounded face and wide, liquid eyes can summon up the indomitable spirit of a Bette Davis heroine. The characters she’s played in these three films – from a bartender to a vocal coach, and now a feminist author and would-be politician – have become more expressive, as she withholds less of herself from the camera. Though all of their films are ensemble pieces, the arrival of her character, Agathe Villanova, is at the center of the drama in Let it Rain, and the story benefits from giving her more to do in front of the lens.

As a favor to a family friend, Villanova agrees to be featured in a documentary, while simultaneously running for office in a local election. To complicate matters further, her long-term relationship, which she refuses to define, is starting to fray, and, at the same time, her sister’s marriage is also unravelling. There are, of course, the requisite subplots and minor characters who come in and out of focus as the narrative progresses. But what is essential to their oeuvre remains true in Let in Rain: that there is hope for the flawed, main characters to change. Jaoui and Bacri deliver these transformative moments, in scenes that could have been excerpts from silent film classics: a man weeps during a poignant scene in a play, as if for the first time in his life; an unhappy actress finally delivers a smile, realizing she is loved; a daughter, invisible to her father, finds her voice at last, and in doing so, also finds a separate, adult self.

The films of Jaoui and Bacri are like song cycles: their soundtracks are filled with lieder (most often by Schubert) that punctuate the opening or closing shots of a scene. The recurring themes are the same from film to film (intimacy, meaningful work, art, family matters), but explored from differing viewpoints, whether cross-cultural, or across class lines. Like lieder, the stories they tell are affecting because they have created a filmed correlative to a musical crescendo, a gradual building up of emotional intensity and insight. No characters on film deserve happy endings more than the sad and self-deluded creations of Jaoui and Bacri. In their world, the broken deserve to be mended; and love, that elusive panacea, is the object that we all covet the most.

[Let it Rain is playing at the Opera Plaza Cinema in San Francisco.]

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Hiring a prostitute to relate to you the nature of how your husband behaves is asking for, not proof of an affair, but an erotic retelling of a person you no longer have an intimacy with. Catherine wants that this surrogate will reimagine her husband in a way that she can no longer.

If you thought 15 minutes was a woefully short amount of screen time for Julianne Moore in A Single Man, then Atom Egoyan’s Chloe is the ultimate remedy. Moore appears in almost every frame, commanding our attention by creating a character who has lost her moral footing. She plays Catherine Stewart, a successful gynecologist, who is alienated both from her husband and their teenage son. What starts as a domestic melodrama rapidly veers into the territory of a psychological dissection thanks to Egoyan, the auteur behind The Sweet Hereafter (1997) and last year’s Adoration.

With this film, the celluloid character of Julianne Moore coalesces into a final statement on the ennui of an unhappy wife, and the subsequent dissolution of her self-possession. Over the years, it’s astonishing to look back at the variety of women she’s created who are confined within this role of domesticity; beginning with Todd Haynes’s Safe and Far From Heaven, moving through The Hours and Savage Grace, she has finally arrived here at Chloe. When Moore appears on television in promotional interviews, one is shocked to see how steady, grounded and poised she seems. To underscore the obvious, the women she portrays are none of these things.

In the following interview, Egoyan recounts his reasons for making a film that he did not write (a rarity within his exquisitely well-written oeuvre), and why his sympathies lie with the bewitching Chloe (Amanda Seyfried), rather than Catherine. He was candid about his process and influences, and able to clarify, while reasonably justifying, his directorial intentions.

The Rumpus: Before we talk about Nathalie, the French film that Chloe is based on, I’d like to talk about Pasolini’s Teorema, which felt like a more relevant predecessor. In Pasolini’s film, each member of a bourgeois family is seduced by the same outsider. This “other,” played by Terence Stamp, acts as a catalyst who threatens the stability of the nuclear family. Chloe is a similar figure in your film: she comes to represent the corruption of social norms, through adultery and homosexuality.

Atom Egoyan: Teorema is one of my favorite films. That film actually begins with an extraordinary scene where the workers have suddenly been given control of this factory, and they’re not quite sure what to do. There is a hastily-convened press conference and then suddenly an angel comes to this home and says that there will be a guest arriving, and it’s Terence Stamp. He is only there for the first half of the film, during which time he does sleep with every member of the family. The last half is chronicling their sense of absence, and how they fall apart. It’s very interesting that you should mention it. I had not thought of Teorema even though it’s a really important film. What’s interesting here, in relation to Chloe: each character has slept with her, even if only in an imaginary way, but still the act is consummated in someone’s thought of it. But in this case, the Terence Stamp figure is fully fleshed out and falls in love with someone. I think that Chloe actually falls for Catherine, which is quite different.

Rumpus: Did you approach the story with a sense that this middle-class family, or Catherine’s (the protagonist’s), moral center needed testing?

Egoyan: It’s not just middle class, this is upper middle class. Catherine can afford a prostitute, she can afford to assert that sort of control. And ultimately, this young woman, Chloe, has access to this very impressive, authorial presence, who is able to coax these stories out, and suddenly she finds herself being heard for the first time. So this has a very powerful effect.

Rumpus: But do you find something culpable about this upper middle class family?

Egoyan: Catherine is completely the villain. She’s a villain inasmuch as she’s incredibly calculating. She thinks that everything in her life can be completely ordered and controlled. And in fact, that has consequences. Consequences not only for her own sense of who she is, but certainly it alienates these two men in her life, completely. And then there’s this story that we had to extract, which is this game, this thing that she does with her son, which is really quite terrifying, in terms of the control she tries to exert over a relationship that he has.

Rumpus: This scene didn’t make it into the film?

Egoyan: No, it was too cumbersome. When his parents refer to the therapy the son is going through, this is a reference to Catherine’s having threatened this other woman who was involved with him. What’s really wonderful about Julianne Moore is that she can go to these quite unsympathetic places but there’s something about her presence as a star which still gives us access to it, and makes us feel as though that’s something we should be following. But it is deceptive.

Rumpus: After I watched A Single Man, I felt that, collectively, Julianne Moore’s characters, at their most affecting, have come to represent various forms of moral decay, urban ennui and decadence.

Egoyan: But in Todd Haynes’s films as well.

Rumpus: And Savage Grace. While she commands every frame of Chloe with an unforced and natural (dis-)ease, I did miss that moment of agony in Teorema, when Silvana Mangano cries out with pain and shame after her descent into promiscuity. In your film, there is a moment that comes close to this, in her office, a moment of controlled rage as she’s writing a check to Chloe. Suddenly, she snaps out of the passive, libidinal daydream from which she’s summoned Chloe. Could you talk about that scene?

Egoyan: You’re talking about when she brings Chloe into the hotel room and rips open the blouse, right? And she’s so determined. It’s a very strange thing to do. “How does he touch you?” And then she stops, then she goes to the bed. She initiates the kind of erotic contact with Chloe. She brings her to the room. She takes her away from her other client, brings her to the room, and literally rips open the blouse, and looks at the breast, you could say in a clinical way, perhaps. She’s demanding to know how her husband touches Chloe. That’s quite an aggressive action too, I would say. I only say that because it was a very difficult thing to choreograph for Julianne because it was so aggressive, more aggressive than the check.

Rumpus: I was thinking verbally.

Egoyan: Yes, verbally, sure. In that hotel room scene, she still wants to engage with Chloe. And with the check, it’s more like she’s signing off, and in a way it’s more hurtful. But if you look at Chloe in that scene, where she’s ripping the dress, she looks stunned.

Rumpus: There are significant changes that were made to the script of Nathalie, in terms of structure and genre. What plays as standard melodrama in France crosses the Atlantic and becomes a suspense thriller. Did you receive the script before seeing Nathalie?

Egoyan: I received the script, but I had seen Nathalie. I had no desire to remake it. It never even occurred to me. This was a project that was initiated by a producer, Ivan Reitman, who saw Nathalie and thought there was another way of approaching it. And then went to Erin Cressida Wilson, who wrote Secretary. And they formulated a script which they came to me with. And I read the script and I thought it was very promising. Then we did some more work on it. It came to me with… Well, a couple of things made it very different from the French film. The French film, we’re not quite sure what Fanny Ardant’s attitude is toward her husband. It’s quite clear that he’s having affairs. And she doesn’t seem particularly perturbed by this.

Rumpus: I think that depends on how you read her acting style. A huge difference in the French version is that the husband’s affairs give her permission to go on the journey she does. It is Catherine’s own unconscious, libidinal daydream that frees her to pursue Chloe. In this way, the audience can find her even more culpable.

Egoyan: What’s culpable is that she’s taking a very strange decision. If you need to prove that someone is having an affair, there are other ways to go about it than hiring a prostitute. Hiring a prostitute to relate to you the nature of how your husband behaves is asking for something different. She wants to have an erotic retelling of a person she no longer has an intimacy with. She wants that this surrogate will reimagine her husband in a way that she can no longer. I don’t know if she’d be able to articulate it that way. But It’s a very specific and controlling action. It’s a tall order. And when Chloe comes back and actually has taken that on, she finds it quite enthralling, and she wants to go further. What she doesn’t understand is, what she is really seeing in Chloe is an opportunity to tell stories about her day-to-day life that she would never be able to express otherwise. This creates an extraordinary alchemical reaction between the two women, where they are in competing fantasies over what the other represents.

Rumpus: This question does emerge by the end of the film: How much of the story is a created fantasy? Due in part to the way you aestheticize Chloe’s death, as a fallen angel, in which she becomes something more than just an ordinary girl. And again, it seemed to me, akin to the Terence Stamp character in Teorema.

Egoyan: I’m so familiar with what you’re talking about because I loved Teorema. But I would have to say it’s completely subconscious. It’s possible I was reading it that way, but it wasn’t intentional. I mean that film has had a huge influence. I’ve written essays about that piece. I know it really intimately, but I wasn’t doing it as a conscious homage. But it’s possible. My films are open to interpretation. So this one is more linear, and more rigid in its ability to withstand conflicting interpretations, but it’s valid what you’re saying. I do think there’s something heightened about the fall, certainly, and about the decision she makes to let go. And also about Catherine’s decision not to help her. I mean all of these things are heightened. The last image in the film is very provocative, as to why this brooch is being worn. Is it a way of remembering Chloe? Or is it a way of ultimately asserting control? The ultimate control is that she’s able to keep the prop and aestheticize it. Those are open to interpretation.

Rumpus: One of the recurring motifs in your films is the idea of, who owns the narrative? Where did your fascination begin with storytelling?

Egoyan: It comes from arriving in a new country at a certain point, where you are part of an ethnic group. We came to Victoria, Canada from Egypt. I was very young. No one quite knew what we were. We were the only Armenian family there. We possessed a number of different personas. We could either be Arabs or Jews: we were other. When you’re a child, you realize that your personality and identity is a construction. Not all immigrant children have this experience but my sense of who I was, was constructed. I was aware of who I was and that I wanted to assimilate. I wanted to be like everyone else. And I was aware of the things I had to learn to do to be like everyone else.

Rumpus: Were your parents similarly aware of those things?

Egoyan: My parents were assimilationists. The reason they moved to Victoria was that they didn’t want to be within the community. They wanted to strike out on their own. They were artists as well. But I made a very clear decision. I think that’s part of it, certainly. There are lots of other formative experiences. This will explain a lot of my movies, perhaps. This woman, young woman, girl I was obsessed with from the ages of 13 to 18. There was a distance that she always had from me. I realized that while I was having in my imagination this fantasy of her, she was being abused by her father. And she never really addressed this, until later on. He was a very powerful figure in the community. I knew that there was something happening but I couldn’t understand what it was. And no one really talked about it. So narratives had to be created in order to justify, to explain things. And some of them were done out of convenience, and some of them were done out of fear. And some out of various types of need. I’ve come to realize that’s been an important part of my formation as well. I’ve come to realize those two things: both my issues as an Armenian, and then, of course, there’s all this political baggage, and with the denial of genocide. There are a number of things that filter in your life in a certain way. They become indelible.

Rumpus: You made that girl’s story indelible in The Sweet Hereafter, with Sarah Polley’s remarkable performance.

Egoyan: I think I caught something there which is very unusual. I was a witness to this: the way an abused victim sometimes has to create a justification for why a parent is behaving this way. And it’s not always about a violent abuse. In the original novel, she was angry with the father from the beginning, and she knew that there was something terribly wrong. From what I observed, she actually felt it was an extension of the father’s love. And so that was a much more insidious mind control.

Rumpus: I wanted to ask you about your use of sound design, and the reduction of ambient noise in the city streets, and other public spaces. The control over sound, in conjunction with the tight close-up of actors, forces us closer, inside the character’s states of mind. I left the theatre with the sense of almost being able to “read” the characters’ thoughts. And your use of light is reminiscent of painters, like Rembrandt or Vermeer. You create the effect of a nimbus, surrounding Julianne.

Egoyan: I have a certain way of painting a frame, which I use in my own films because the narratives are so distancing in some ways, the ways in which the stories are structured. So I have to make the frame seductive in a specific way so the viewer will be drawn into these narratives which would otherwise be quite alienating. I’m using, as you would say, the painting of the frame, but also the sound design, and the music, in a specific way to lure, and to create a sense of seduction. This film probably didn’t need that. In a more conventional script like this, it doesn’t need that level of attention. But it’s now the way I make frames anyhow. Whether or not, I don’t think it distracts from the story. But it amplifies it in a way which is not necessary for a more traditional melodrama. This could have been shot, lit more conventionally, and I think it would have been able to hold its own. While my own dramas need that type of light. So the relationship I have with my director of photography, my sound designer, my composer, my editor, all of whom worked on this film as well as the others. There’s an inherited approach that we take, which we didn’t accommodate because this was a more linear script. I think you would see a visual similarity in the frames through the other films. The one thing that’s different in this film, there’s more use of conventional close-up, many more close-ups than you would normally have. And actually, at the beginning, maybe even distractingly so. The language is almost distractingly conventional. Because I didn’t want to imprint a style on it as I would my other films, with very long tracking shots. My way of choreographing the camera is connected to the way I write scripts. So the two things are folded into each other. I didn’t want to impose that type of camera gesture on someone else’s script. It wasn’t written to have that interpretation, so I didn’t want to impose something on it.

Rumpus: Going back to Nathalie, the actresses Ardant and Emmanuelle Beart are much closer in age than Moore and Amanda Seyfried. Why did you make this change?

Egoyan: I was compelled by this mother/daughter thing, I suppose. I really wanted to have that age separation. To me, that was really important, and is very different from Nathalie as well. She’s someone who has a clientele specifically because of her age. It was a very conscious choice. We saw a lot of actresses who had that more hardened persona, which I think you get with the original film, with Beart as well. But I wanted to work against that. I wanted to play something else.

Rumpus: In closing, I have a question about the actress Rachel Blanchard. You’ve used her twice (in Where the Truth Lies and Adoration) as your own Laura Palmer figure. Why have you cast her in this role?

Egoyan: There’s something kind of ethereal about her. It’s hard to explain. She’s so pristinely beautiful that it’s kind of surreal somehow. I can’t say anything more than that. She surprised me in Where the Truth Lies. She exceeded what I was expecting. There’s something about her, which is why that role was inspired by a feeling that she gave me. There’s something not natural about it, and yet natural.

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My name is Jeff and I’m an addict. My drug of choice: Swedish detective fiction.

After an intense phase of reading Iris Murdoch novels, I found myself washed ashore in a dreaded no man’s land; I was between authors. (It’s a dreary, puzzling place to find oneself in, much like logging on to Facebook.) Thankfully, a friend of mine came to the rescue by introducing me to the Swedish writer Henning Mankell, whose career-defining creation, Inspector Kurt Wallander, is an anti-hero par excellence. He’s an accident-prone divorcé, who is lousy at personal intimacy and even worse at office politics, but he gets it absolutely right when it comes to solving brutal crimes that confound everyone else on the force. I devoured the series in a hurry, and was then left where I’d started: authorless.

Sure, I took some fine literary detours with A.S. Byatt, Louise Erdrich and Mary Gaitskill, but in the back of my mind I felt anxious for all those snowbound Swedes: without Wallander around, who was going to solve all those murders, while, at the same time, lucidly explaining the societal ills of Northern Europe? Just as my initiation into Mankell’s fictional world ended, Stieg Larsson’s own series of books were published (posthumously) in English, beginning with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Did Stieg instantly satisfy and seduce in the way that Henning had? No, not instantly, but he did hold my attention with the moody, brooding tone of a cold, cold, wintry Sweden. And instead of one anti-hero, Larsson provided his readers with two. He pairs a finance journalist named Mikael Blomkvist with an unlikely partner, Lisbeth Salander, a young Goth girl who also happens to be a brilliant computer hacker. Each of these characters have a vulnerability, a flaw that exposes each one of them to harm, but which ultimately bring them together to solve the central crime of the novel.

The BBC recently made an impassioned and faithful adaptation of the Wallander series, starring the perfectly-cast Kenneth Branagh. For the film version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the smartest move the producers made was to keep the story at home. Remember the difference between the original Norwegian production of Insomnia (1997), starring Stellan Skarsgard (pre-Mamma Mia!), and the unnecessary American remake with Al Pacino (post-Scent of a Woman)? What’s chilling and somber in Scandinavia comes across as ham-fisted and melodramatic in Hollywood. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, however, is such an effective thriller that an English-language version, directed by, say, Ridley Scott or Kathryn Bigelow, would be well worth the cross-cultural translation.

The story begins with Blomkvist’s disgrace in court: he’s convicted of libel. His sudden infamy brings him to the attention of an aging business magnate, Henrik Vanger, whose beloved niece, Harriet, has been missing for several decades. Everyone in the extensive Vanger clan believes that Harriet has been murdered, but her body was never found. What draws Blomkvist into this world is the same thing that bewitched Dana Andrews in Otto Preminger’s Laura and Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock’s Vertigo: the haunting image of a lovely woman, and the mystery surrounding her disappearance.

The director, Niels Arden Oplev, makes visually explicit in the film what is only implied in the novel. Blomkvist repeatedly stares at a black and white photo of Harriet, as if he’s in a trance, spellbound by an irretrievable, lost love. It’s one of the many fine devices that are used in the movie to condense the novel’s wide-reaching, overlong narrative. The depiction of violence against women, though, was disturbing to read, and more upsetting to watch.
As if anticipating this criticism, Larsson constructs parallel accounts of two women who are able to empower themselves, despite the abuse they suffer from the men in their lives. One of these women is Lisbeth Salander. It is through her insight, instinct and intellect that Blomkvist is able to complete the Herculean task he has been given. In this fictional Sweden, men are mostly bestial, emotionally tone deaf and/or ignorant, while resourceful women are smart enough to survive without them.

I haven’t yet read the Girl sequels because there’s a part of me that misses Wallander’s small town life in Ystad. The world seemed like a safer place when he was awake at 3 a.m., playing opera at full blast, obsessed with yet another case. Larsson was a natural heir to Mankell’s style, but unlike his progenitor’s work, both the book and film versions of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo lack Wallander’s good heart. Or, perhaps that detective was the last of a dying breed who first instigated, then finally cured me, of my need for frozen noir.

***

Rumpus original art by Melissa Tan.

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The curtain opens to silence, and a screen of black fog slowly dissolves into a long view of a colorless, rural village. Within the first few seconds of his new film, The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke has saturated a world with a sense of unseen yet palpable menace. As the village materializes out of darkness, the cinematographer captures the daylight in black and white, like a forgotten memory briefly retrieved from someone’s mind. Then, a narrator’s voice — clearly that of an old man burdened with a quaver — sets the tone for the story he is about to tell us. His voice is hushed and grave, compelling us to listen; we can hear that he’s been haunted for a lifetime.

Set in Northern Germany just prior to World War I, this unnamed village has retained its feudal caste system. The landowning baron and baroness employ half of the peasant farming population, while the ascetic pastor preaches to a crowded and deferential congregation. (Not since Bishop Vergérus, from Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, have I seen a religious figure this terrifying and severe.) Fifteen minutes pass, then thirty, before we learn who the narrator is, the school teacher, and that he’s a central witness to the recounted events. By delaying the introduction — a way of withholding information from the audience — Haneke immediately elevates the level of tension in an otherwise ordinary setting.

In the first few minutes we are, at once, located in a specific time and place, yet also suffer from a profound sense of dislocation. The school teacher informs us that a series of strange accidents once afflicted the village. We start to see these events as he describes them: A horse and rider stride along a country road, through tall fields of billowing grain. Suddenly, the horse stumbles forward, and his mount is thrown to the earth. The camera is placed directly in front of them so that the viewers vicariously feel the shock of flesh as it slams hard to the ground. During the subsequent investigation, a nearly invisible wire is found, tied between two trees. Who would want to inflict such pain upon, or even murder, the rider, the village doctor?

With this question, the real narrative begins. It is through the doctor’s fall that we are introduced to his children and neighbors, and the rest of the community. While the doctor is recovering in hospital, we find his two children weeping on the staircase. Anna is failing in her attempt to console her younger brother, Rudi, when she is interrupted from her ministrations by the sound of rocks tapping on window panes. A group of school children, verging on, or raging toward, adolescence, stares up at her as she opens the window.

In this and in every scene that follows, Haneke, like a sorcerer of some dark art, is able to sustain the threatening sensation of something about to break. His power comes from the execution of the shot, as the camera keeps pace with Anna’s slow crossing of the room, coupled with the menacing sound of rock on glass. This power to command our attention also stems from his direction of the actors, and their unrivaled ability to disappear inside this recreation of the past, an other world. With one medium close-up shot of the children standing outside the doctor’s window, we instantly intuit that Klara, the pastor’s daughter, is the ringleader. Standing at the head of the pack, her eyes generate an unforgettable coldness.

Are these children responsible for the doctor’s horse riding accident, for the death of a farmer’s wife, for a granary fire, for the kidnap and torture of the baron’s son, for the atmosphere thickening with animosity and mistrust? The terrible beauty of The White Ribbon recalls Alberto Moravia’s novel The Conformist, in which a budding young fascist hunts and torments the neighborhood animals: “Marcello, at that time, was remorselessly, shamelessly cruel, that was perfectly natural, for it was from cruelty that he derived the only pleasures that did not seem to him insipid, and this cruelty was still childish enough to arouse no suspicions either in himself or in others.” It is this preconscious phase for both the villagers, the parents and elders, and the children themselves, that leaves the community in a perpetual state of unknowingness. They are quite literally unable to articulate the thought, or give voice to the idea, that their own progeny could be capable of causing such damage.

How could this village, a microcosm of the society at large, tolerate a series of crimes, of vile, inhumane acts perpetrated against their very own friends and neighbors? Without once alluding to the rise of Adolf Hitler and the beginning of the Third Reich in 1933, The White Ribbon breathes an unholy life into the generation of children who would grow up to become the obedient soldiers and members of the Nazi party. Haneke indirectly asks: What was the genesis of, and who is accountable for, this morally corrupt generation?

Without offering an explicit answer (the children are never found guilty of, nor do we see anyone committing the crimes), Haneke crafts the story like a fable or a grim parable, in which the sole lesson a child can learn is that everyone dies. As subtle and obvious as the missive in Poe’s “Purloined Letter,” the director does, however, offer the viewer a clue: the title of the movie itself. Early in the film, the pastor forces two of his children (including Klara), to wear a white ribbon — a symbol of purity — as a punitive measure for disobeying his authority. Two decades later, many of these same children would be wearing black ribbons around their arms. With one simple inversion, Haneke foreshadows the future of German aggression, and the consequences of its violent immolation.

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When your lover has gone — leaving only darkness as a companion — where in this world can you find some consolation? In lieu of drinking away your sense of abandonment, I suggest you turn that restless gaze toward the next screening of Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film, Broken Embraces. If, however, you are happily espoused, and no unrequited love has ever haunted you or caused you harm, then this Spanish melodrama won’t savage your memory banks. Romantic emotion, which, in this case, idealizes an absent lover, saturates every frame of this film.

As in Volver, Almodóvar’s 2006 release, Penélope Cruz is the director’s muse and protagonist. Unlike Volver, the point of view has shifted from her character’s first-person, present-tense actions, to a third-person, past-tense account, or recounting, of her story. This change signals a more elliptical mode of storytelling from the previous film. In Volver, we trust the immediacy of the events on screen because they are unfolding forward in time; Broken Embraces requires something else from the audience: patience, as the narrative shifts in time are both backwards and forward. We are also dependent upon the memory and reliability of one narrator, Mateo, the damaged lover (as it turns out), and we have to trust his version of events.

In doing so, the filmmaker has taken a great risk: he focuses our sympathies on a man, Mateo, and not first allying us with Cruz’s character Lena. Volver posited a world of intense female camaraderie, where men are the source of damage and grief. Almodóvar’s first international success, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), imagined a similar society, where women act as each other’s foils and consciences, with conditional (yet affectionate) love, and often humorous support. In his subsequent films, the most affecting ones show realistic portraits of women, in their roles at work and at home, as struggling mothers, wives, daughters, sisters and lovers. Like George Cukor before him, Almodóvar elicits cinematic magic from the actresses he casts. With the exception of Talk to Her, the stories he writes for men fall flat by comparison. For Broken Embraces, the risk he’s taken with this narrative shift, and the complexity it breeds, pays off in the end.

The plot reveals an intricate maze, in which all of the characters find themselves intimately connected, but no one in the story emerges from this labyrinth unscathed. Each character is introduced and defined by a weakness, some flaw that instantly humanizes them. Mateo, a writer and film director, is blind. And our first glimpse of Lena, an aspiring actress, is when she’s in distress. Her father is dying of cancer. Ernesto, her boss, arranges for his palliative care. Out of gratitude, and perhaps resignedly, Lena allows herself to become the mistress of this wealthy, older man.

The actor Jose Luis Gomez imbues Ernesto’s eyes with all of that man’s emotional limitations: they are ravenous for Lena, and nothing else. He is in the impossible position of a Humbert Humbert, wracked with inappropriate, unyielding desire. After Lena meets Mateo and they become lovers, she feels freed enough to confess her revulsion to Ernesto’s touch. There is an astonishing scene that follows when Ernesto, fearing he has already lost Lena, spirits her out of town for a weekend getaway. Almodóvar films their bodies, engaged in sex, completely covered in ghostly white sheets. At one point, as in Magritte’s painting The Lovers (1928), hoods form around their heads, brilliantly foreshadowing someone’s demise. After this sad coupling, Lena stands, bare breasted, in front of the bathroom mirror.

It is a familiar trope in filmmaking, a woman confronting her own reflection in a mirror. This is a private space, a room of her own, where she prepares her appearance, her public face. There are countless examples: Glenn Close in Dangerous Liaisons; Cathy Moriarty in Raging Bull; Rita Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai; ad infinitum. It is a moment of stock-taking, of epiphany, or even transformation. Naked, in front of the mirror, it is clear that Lena is aware of the choices she has made in her life, the ones that have brought her to that particular moment of moral sickness and doubt. Cruz makes the revelation heart-breaking. Since her star-making turn in Volver, Cruz has evolved into a great actress, whose films the audience longs to return to: she and Almodóvar have created whole and complete worlds. Indeed, Broken Embraces mirrors our own — but brightly — and is suffused with terrible need and wistful desire.

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