The Artist (2011)

"The Artist" of the title is, I presume, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), a silent film actor in the late 1920s, about to be rendered obsolete by the talkies. He isn't much of an artist. Dujardin's brilliant mugging as he acts the actor acting (if you see what I mean), his identikit pictures, his glamorous swagger: this is a star, and Hollywood is an industry. Michel Hazanavicius's silent, black-and-white homage to the era uses great craft to pastiche an era when the craft was a little less sophisticated.

Before sound arrives and the silent industry collapses, Valentin, at a premiere of his latest movie, literally bumps into Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), who is in the mass of fans outside the theater. Their chance meeting is splashed over the gossip pages. That, of course, will not be that. She is hired as a dancer for Valentin's latest feature; when she is recognized as the troublemaker from the newspapers, she is saved from being fired only by Valentin's intervention.

This first act was my favorite by quite a margin. Later there is classic melodrama, but first we have classic comedy. The stylized black-and-white, silent nostalgia worked a lot better for me in service of the light romp of the preening star than the descent to come later. And it does work. Dujardin and Bejo look just right, and survive perfectly well without words. For some reason I think Valentin and Miller's cute-as-a-button spark as they catch the giggles while trying to film a scene would have been much less sympathetic with sound.

Valentin is about to pass Miller on the way down, as the talkies will launch her to the top just as they cast Valentin aside. Their moment together is past unrequited, with Valentin returning to his distressingly complete alienation of affection for his wife, and Miller whisked off to stardom. It's lucky that the brief scenes of their meeting work so well, since they have to carry the weight of the two stars' opposing fortunes as well as the affection the two clearly feel for each other.

What kind of affection is not clear. Maybe by the Hays-code constraints of the movie's style, chastity is unbreakable? In this way the constraints bleed into the action, and I found myself wondering if there was anything we weren't seeing. Valentin descends - at length - into booze and despair, and Miller works occasionally to help him, silently so as not to hurt his pride, but the precise why stays unknown. I thought as the pace settled down while Valentin falls, the stylistic facade seemed a little less convincing. An homage to comedy still gets to tell jokes after all.

It seems to be that pride that does Valentin in, but again I wasn't sure exactly why. At the moment his fortune turns, Valentin's producer Al Zimmer (John Goodman) shows him a screen test of an actress with sound. Valentin leaves, laughing. Is he being forced out of the industry, obsolete, as Zimmer claims later? Or is he walking through the door alone, refusing to ride this new wave, unable or afraid? At times it seems to be him, and at others the world. I suppose things always seems a little that way when things are going badly.

In any case the movie certainly doesn't seem to take a stand one way or the other. Which is fine; "The Artist" is a sweet confection, not an exercise in whys. To revel in the sights, sounds and mechanics of a bygone era seems to be the goal, and the material itself is very much a square peg for the square hole of the style. I wonder whether the same nostalgic style could ever work with something a bit more complicated, or if the medium really constrains the possibilities of the story. Does silence restrict a movie to simple emotions, or does everything just look simpler in silence?


Links: IMDb, Metacritic

A Dangerous Method (2011)

The three people at the center of David Cronenberg's "A Dangerous Method" aren't a love triangle in the traditional sense, but their relationship is just as messy. The movie follows the fathers of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), and Sabina Spielrein (Kiera Knightley), patient and later lover of Jung, still later patient of Freud, still later student of both and a renowned psychiatrist in her own right. It's a complicated path.

The movie opens with a screaming and resistant Spielrein, daughter to a wealthy Russian businessman, being committed to a psychiatric hospital. There she meets Jung, who explains that he will try the new "talking cure". He sits behind her, so as not to distract her, he says: Knightley then is facing us directly, her face filling the screen, with Fassbender behind. As he questions her, her face contorts and her voice whispers and shrieks - the performance is almost over-the-top and certainly uncomfortable to watch, which I suppose is the whole point.

We cut to Jung and Spielrein strolling the hospital grounds, talking on much the same basis as in the treatment room. But wasn't Jung supposed to be out of sight during the treatment? What could be going on here? It immediately seems inevitable that Jung and Spielrein are certainly not going to be just doctor and patient. Surely Jung can see this too; for him to insist on being in the background at one moment and to talk on equal footing the next seems to ask for trouble. Either there will be heroic compartmentalization or things will get complicated.

Eventually the two will indeed become lovers, even as Jung's wife produces a series of children. Their affair will see Spielrein satisfying the fetishes that were exposed by her talk therapy and that she had believed were wrong and made her dangerous and broken. Jung seems tawdry by comparison. Despite some hand-wringing about whether it is right to explore or repress base urges, ultimately his motivation seems to be the obvious one. Either way it was a little surprising to hear the two of them talk later in the movie about their outsized love for each other; at times there didn't seem to be a lot between them.

Against all this, Jung and Freud are meeting for the first time and developing a personal and professional relationship. Freud praises the younger man as the heir to the throne; Jung calls Freud a father figure. But Freud, with Mortensen showing him judicious and logical, believes in strict and narrow psychoanalysis, concerned with the perception of their new field from outside. He seems to be a marketer and frames his favoring of Jung as a way to give the profession a face not of the Vienna Jewish community. Jung interprets these not as political acts but as evidence that Freud is no longer an innovator. He wants instead to promote a broader psychoanalysis, one that includes things that Freud sees as unscientific at best and superstitious at worst. Their polite parrying darkens as time goes on; my favorite scenes of the movie were those with Mortensen and Fassbender alone, the gentle tension between them ebbing and flowing.

But in the end for all the talk in the film, the difference of opinion between Freud and Jung is not really explained in great depth. Their relationship really breaks down in the regular fashion, no matter how much they try to cover the rift with the fig-leaf of intellectual disagreement. Jung's relationship with Spielrein colors their arguments and, when Spielrein forces Jung to reveal it to Freud, disappoints the older man. Fassbender, in Jung and in his other recent starring role, seems to have nailed down playing ashamed, although here it not because of the sex itself but the deceit. Jung seems to be unable to address his desires. As he fights Freud's belief that the root of all patients' problems is sexual, the affair with Spielrein frays his nerves.

To complete the triangle, after their affair is exploded, Spielrein demands that Jung recommend that Freud take her as a patient. She seems unleashed by Freud's method and her affair with Jung from what had been debilitating illness, and is now training to be a psychiatrist in her own right. With Freud as a pivot, the doctor and patient are in the process of switching roles, he ruined and on the verge of a nervous breakdown after losing his young mistress and his mentor, and she developing Freud's work in new directions, impressing the old man in the role he had earmarked for Jung. In the end it is Spielrein who is the strong and confident center, against the aging Freud and the crumbling Jung.


Links: IMDb, Metacritic

A Separation (2011)

Asghar Farhadi's "A Separation" begins with husband and wife Nader (Peyman Moadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) sitting side by side, facing us, explaining their problem to an unseen adjudicator. They had planned to emigrate, for a better life for their daughter, she says. They finally have visas to leave, and 40 days left to use them. But Nader's father has Alzheimer's: how can he leave his father, he asks? His father no longer recognizes him, Simi says. But he recognizes his father, Nader says. And so on. Simin has petitioned for divorce, threatening to leave without him.

It is too reasonable and too difficult. The camera sits unmoving, pinning us in the adjudicator's chair as Simin pleads and Nader rebuts, but how could we possibly decide? There can be no victory for anyone. Both positions are reasonable. Thus the separation happens. Simin leaves the family home, laboring her exit but in vain: Nader does not try to stop her. In Simin's absence, Nader hires Razieh (Sareh Bayat) to care for his father during the day. This sets off a situation that mirrors the reasonableness and difficulty of the original dilemma, but this one more complex and urgent. Again we are put in the impossible position of trying to adjudicate.

Razieh, pregnant and with her daughter in tow, comes to work. The commute is long and the job is difficult, and, worse, Razieh is concealing from her unemployed husband Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini) that she is working at all. She is conscientious but suffering, having spells of dizziness and fatigue. Nader he comes home early one day to find Razieh and her daughter gone, the door locked, and his father tied to the bed and unconscious. Money is missing too; we know that there is an innocent explanation for this but Nader does not. He is angry. When Razieh returns, he orders her out of the house, but she comes back to protest her innocence of the theft. When Nader throws her out a second time, he seems to push her out the door. Neighbors find her injured in the stairway. Later, in hospital, we lean that she has miscarried.

Nader is accused of manslaughter. Did he know that Razieh was pregnant? If so, the judge decides, he can reasonably be punished for killing the child. The decision will hinge on this piece of information, but while the court goes about trying to learn it, we are tormented by watching all of the players laid out on the rack of a brutal situation that is immensely more complicated than any legal decision could ever allow.

"A Separation" isn't a many-perspectives movie, but it pulls off with astonishing success the trick that that genre most covets, the harnessing of sympathy for each character very nearly always, even when they are in direct opposition. The predicament is finely poised, the actions of all the players terribly understandable, and a successful resolution for everyone utterly impossible. I found it almost overwhelming. Where a movie like "Crash" (2004) attempts the same by having heroes and villains exchange places from moment to moment, "A Separation" needs no heroes or villains. The shifts, such as they are, are in emotional perspective and they're impeccably subtle. I can't think of another movie that performs this magic so well.

The tiny crack in the armor is Nader's passivity. Throughout he asks others to judge and decide for him. Simin can leave if she wants, he says. If his daughter Termeh thinks him guilty she should do one thing, and if not another. This equivocating could endanger the plot's perfect conceit by making it seem merely unsolved rather than insoluble: it almost seemed as if things could be OK if only Nader could decide something for himself. But Nader, being at the center of things, is in the end the most like us, skewered on a Morton's fork of impossible choices. It's hard to blame Nader for his passivity when it is so difficult for us as mere observers to decide what is right.

And always there is Nader's father. It is hard to say whether he is only an excuse for Nader to avoid emigrating with his family, despite his obvious devotion, but in this desperate movie he is indispensable, the one immovable object in the fluid tragedy. Without him the conflicts would be petty; he is an anchor to the tragedy, the more so that his disease has him a shadow of whatever he once was. After the separation he whispers Simin's name, questioning as best he can, to Nader. After the day of Razieh's tragedy he falls silent entirely. Simin is not there anymore.

She is often absent for us, too, as Farhadi keeps her offscreen for long chunks in which the worst of the tragedy is happening. We don't see what she is up to in the meantime. Neither does she see the nuance of the situation when returns, because she is the active force, seeking solutions. Watching her actions when she is pulled back in, it is difficult to imagine that the decision to emigrate was not hers alone.

In the separation there has been nothing but catastrophe. Simin and Nader's original dilemma, then, has been horribly amplified: if only they had been together, these things would never had happened. Should Simin never have left, forgoing her dream of a better life for them all? Should Nader have agreed to go, leaving his father and the world he knows? We arrive back where we started. In a perfect final scene it is Termeh who is being hounded to decide between her parents. Repeatedly she is asked: have you decided? How can she make such a decision?


Links:
IMDb, Metacritic