-

“Sieveking explores the TM phenomenon via his adoration for Lynch, and what starts off as a deeply annoying exercise in overdone idol worship turns into a pretty funny and highly-critical look at the TM organization.”

David Wants to Fly

Directed by David Sieveking

A couple of years ago, I got a David Lynch CD for Christmas.  It was the audio version of his book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity. The audiobook (which Lynch narrates) describes the beginnings of his longtime practice of Transcendental Meditation (TM) and how said practice helped him shed his “suffocating rubber clown suit of negativity” to “dive into an ocean of pure consciousness” and “fish” for ideas.

Just so you know, the whole audiobook is like that, and by “that” I mean “casually weird and vaguely spiritual and all the more entertaining for it”.  As of the writing of this review, I’ve listened to the whole thing about a dozen times, not because it offers any tangible guidance, but because it’s just so calming listening to him talk.  To me, David Lynch is like a tranquil noisemaker-voiced mid-western yogi.  His weirdness always seemed to be an extension of a deep sense of self-acceptance, something pretty rare in this sea of insecurity we call twenty-first century pop culture.

So it’s a little unsettling to see him look so cornered in David Wants to Fly, the uneven but engrossing doc by first-time director David Sieveking.  In it, Sieveking explores the TM phenomenon via his adoration for Lynch, and what starts off as a deeply annoying exercise in overdone idol worship turns into a pretty funny and highly-critical look at the TM organization.

First of all, it should be noted that the David in the title is not Lynch, but Sieveking.  The premise is that Sieveking is a struggling former film school brat, still mooching off his parents while trying to figure out how to make his first feature.  Since he’s always admired David Lynch, he decides to attend a talk the filmmaker is holding about Transcendental Meditation.  Sieveking goes and is hooked by the promise of spiritual and creative awakening.  (For those new to TM, I wish I could give you a clear idea as to what it actually is.  Founded by Mahareshi Mahesh Yogi – a.k.a. the Beatles’ guru – it’s based on the practice of repeating a secret Sanskrit “mantra” for about twenty minutes a day.  Your “mantra” is assigned to you via this uber secret ceremony conducted by trained TM teachers etc. etc…you can google their official website, if you want, though my conclusion, and the conclusion of David Wants to Fly, is that it’s an organization based on selling spirituality.  I say, stick to yoga.)

Making himself the main character of his own film, Sieveking initially comes off as rather self-important.  He cuts too often to his insincere-looking reaction shots and there’s a whole subplot involving his relationship with his girlfriend that I think the film could’ve done without.  But he grows on you.  When the film makes the eventual turn to becoming critical of TM (and by extension, of Lynch) Sieveking proves himself to be an adept investigator and, when it comes to Lynch, a better-than-average stalker.  Like most of the people in the theatre with me, I was mostly interested in the Lynch factor and we are treated to a couple of interviews that show the normally self-assured filmmaker in an uncomfortable light.  When cornered with the questionable business practices of the organization that he is promoting, Lynch appears confused, lost and even frail.  You feel sorry for the guy because although his devotion to this practice is probably sincere, having it questioned so openly brings up truths he can’t ignore.

But here I am, talking endlessly about Lynch like some raving fan.  Of course he is the catalyst to the plot and if you enjoy Lynch as either a filmmaker or personality, I’d recommend this film if only to show that our idols are easily fallible.  The heart of the story, though, speaks of that journey we all take, wading through flashy philosophies until we come upon a true sense of what we actually believe.  Sieveking may not begin likeable or sincere-sounding, but in light of what he discovers about TM and about himself, you end up rooting for him.  Or, at least, I did.  Not bad for a first feature, I say.  I wish David (both of them) the best of luck.

- Lena Duong

The People Vs. George Lucas

Directed by Alexandre O. Philippe

Full disclosure: I have never watched Star Wars.

How much flack do I get for this?  That depends on who I’m talking to.  With girls, the news that I am part of the 0.001% of the population who hasn’t seen Star Wars is usually met with mild surprise and an indifferent “It’s good, but it’s not amazing or anything”.  With guys, I sometimes get showered with the kind of outrage usually reserved for Creation theorists.

-What do you mean you’ve never seen Star Wars?!  I thought you liked Kevin Smith movies!

Well, I saw Episode I…

-Ok, that doesn’t even count!  Do you even know who Boba Fett is??

Is he the one Liam Neeson played?

-What the f*ck, Lena.  What.  The.  F*ck.

Personally, I don’t think that this kind of ignorance has in any way been detrimental to my cultural education, especially since I enjoy the fandom aspect way more than I could ever possibly enjoy the movies themselves.  It is the vibrancy of Star Wars fan culture that makes a documentary like The People vs. George Lucas enjoyable beyond the realm of its subject.  Entertaining, funny and warm, it celebrates the DIY ingenuity of fans that counteracts the stodgy image of passive, lonely culture consumption that plagues the stereotypical (and outdated) idea of what it means to be a nerd. At its heart, it tackles a question that comes up increasingly often in our era of countless adapto-remakes, and one that can be discussed by those in and out of the loop: does the creator of a cultural phenomenon owe anything to the fans who put him on his glossy pedastal?

The creator in question, of course, is George Lucas and the short answer, as given by the many interviews accumulated by director Alexandre Phillipe, is yes.  From your average everygeek, to cultural studies professors, to nerdcore musicians, to TV personalities, to Neil Gaiman, Phillipe covers almost every base possible when it comes to finding people to talk about how Star Wars, and anything else spawned from the fertile grounds of Lucasfilm, changed their lives and inspired them to create the kind of obsessive, creative geek art that you can find linked to Boingboing.  Whether you think fandom is cool or bat-guano crazy, you kind of have to admire the ingenuity that some of these folks exhibit: stop-motion remakes, musicals, hand-made to-scale costumes.  There is no denying that Star Wars is a culture in and of itself, and George Lucas didn’t do that, the fans did.  With the amount of energy (and money) they’ve put into loving his work, some of those fans feel that Lucas owes them output to their specifications.  There is, of course, a whole section of the film devoted to the controversial prequel trilogy, arguably the most ire-inspiring set of films in cinematic history and the lynchpin to the fierce love-him-hate-him dichotomy in the psyche of fans everywhere.  As a non-fan, I sympathized with this sense of cultural betrayal, but when someone described himself as being a ‘battered wife’ at the hands of Lucas and Co., I kind of had to draw the line.

But back to the original question: does George Lucas owe his fans anything?  The short answer may be ‘Yes’ but the long answer is ‘Yes, but…’  What could have easily been a whine-fest turns out to be a love letter.  At the end of the day, George Lucas made Star Wars and fans love him for it.  And whether you like Star Wars, hate Star Wars or can’t tell a wookie from an ewok, watching this movie kind of makes you love the fans, in all their obsessive, lightsaber-wielding glory.

The People Vs. George Lucas – Dir. Alexandre Phillipe, USA, 97 min
www.peoplevsgeorge.com

Visit the official home page for the Hot Docs Film Festival @ http://www.hotdocs.ca/

-  Lena Duong

A difficult film to watch, not because it is pornographic, or even all that graphic, but because we watch the characters become increasingly desperate as they realize they are no longer suited to the world around them.

The Night Porter (1974)

Directed by Lilliana Cavani
Italy – 118 min. Color
Criterion Spine # 59

“History is present,” writes E.L. Doctorow and its presence weighs heavy in every frame of Lilliana Cavani’s The Night Porter.  Here is a film that is about war, but is not a war film, about sex that is not erotic and about redemption from those who do not seek to be redeemed.  It is a film about hunger at its most primal, that fierce desire for survival that eats away those who have yielded to it.  It is a difficult film to watch.

The theme of the movie, one of them, is the transformative power of war.  You never really think about war in that light because so much emphasis is put on what has been destroyed, especially when we talk about World War 2 and the monumental amount of life lost in its wake.

We meet our main characters twelve years after the end of that war and we see how quickly the facades they’ve built in peace time crumble.  Max (Dirk Bogarde), is the eponymous night porter in a Vienna hotel, one of a small group of former concentration camp guards and ardent Nazi loyalists who cling to their shamed ideology and “file away” potentially damning witnesses to their war crimes.  If he looks like a man who is quietly scornful of his life, he is.  His disdain for a job that involves entertaining spoiled, rich women is palpable and does little to hide his survivor’s guilt.  It is almost as though he lives out of obligation, like he knows that he got away and hates the world for making it so easy.

These emotions get further complicated with the arrival of Lucia (Charlotte Rampling) to his hotel.  She is now an elegant maestro’s wife, but the look on her face when she sees Max for the first time is a complicated one.  When you watch this film, pay attention to this scene because it is a testament to silent acting.  They both look like they ran into brick walls and at first the expressions are inscrutable, but intense.  Whatever their history, you think, it is the kind that dooms people.

Through a series of silent, haunting flashbacks, we get the full story: she was his prisoner in a concentration camp, surviving by becoming his plaything and participant in a sado-masochistic relationship.You get the sense that she entered the arrangement willingly, even if refusing to do so surely meant death.  Not long after they reunite in Vienna, they re-kindle this “romance”.  This obviously creates some conflict between Max and his colleagues, who view Lucia as perhaps the most dangerous witness to their crimes.  Max and Lucia eventually resort to re-enacting their disturbing concentration camp scenes in a darkened apartment, where hunger and fear starts a regression into their former, truer selves.

It’s easy to understand why, upon its original release, The Night Porter was considered by its most vehement critics as pornographic and exploitative.  After all, it combines sex and the Holocaust in a way that is disturbing when you consider the usual images we associate with this period – the stars, the showers, the striped pygamas.  What is short-sighted about this criticism is that it ignores the fact that Nazi culture was inherently exploitative and grotesque.  I don’t claim to be an expert on the tastes and proclivities of Hitler’s finest, but if there were a subculture that brought perversity to operatic  and artistic heights, it’s the Third Reich.  We only ever consider the fact that they are monsters because films and stories about them are always told on the side of their victims.  What Cavani does, very intelligently I find, is not to portray them as monsters, but to present them as men and women with monstrously distorted morals and a taste for ugly luxury.

Take the famous cabaret scene where Lucia – dressed in suspenders, pants and little else – entertains some SS guards and sings a throaty Marlene Dietrich number.  At the end of the scene Max, who has been watching her with a sort of pet-owner’s pride, offers her a gift that turns out to be the head of a guard.  When he sees her recoil in fear, his face registers confusion, discomfort.  We overlook sometimes the power of situation and ideology and forget that these people truly believe they’re not doing anything wrong.  It is a belief that Max’s colleagues hold onto after the war and a belief that stews conflict in Max.

The ending is inevitable, the way they usually are when fate and time don’t coincide.   I kind of wish the Criterion set had more (or any) extras, though the website links to a pretty competent essay

As I said, it is a difficult film to watch, not because it is pornographic, or even all that graphic, but because we watch the characters become increasingly desperate as they realize they are no longer suited to the world around them.  They give in, slowly, to more dominating forces and with each level of surrender, they become smaller, weaker and more themselves.

- Lena Duong

Visit the Criterion Collection website

Revanche is a tough slow, depressing film, but incredibly well-acted, consistently believable, and an always entertaining, modest, satisfying arty crime story.

-

Revanche (2008)

Directed by Gotz Spielmann

Australia – 122 mi. Color

Criterion Spine #502

“If you plan revenge, dig two graves,” the saying goes…

A prostitute trying to escape her desperate existence, her ex-criminal boyfriend looking for some quick cash to pay back his debt, a rookie cop caught in a bank heist and his wife, desperately trying to get pregnant. On paper, Revanche sounds like the casting agent call sheet for a crackerjack Hollywood thriller full of twists and turns but Austrian director Gotz Spielmann has crafted something more. The less you know about the plot the better, but there’s no harm in saying it’s a construction that brings both couples to the intersection of violence much like Amores Perros or Babel.

Among the most buzzed-about films at the 2009 Telluride Film Festival and Oscar nominee for best foreign-language film, Revanche has thriller elements to be sure, but the Austrian writer/director treats his material more like an old-fashioned noir. This carefully plotted drawn-out tale of vengeance can be viewed as either a thriller with psychological overtones or a psychological drama with thriller elements. Revanche is a slow-burning, rich character study in desperation, grief, vengeance, loyalty, and love. In many ways a variation on The Postman Always Rings Twice and in the vein of Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground (which navigates a similar journey from seedy urban environments to a peaceful countryside).

The French title means “revenge,” but that’s a deliberate simplification of the film. Spielmann’s film is full of surprises and, in its distinctive way, full of life. As the characters struggle with their moral dilemmas, they are gradually transformed into figures who are more vulnerable and complex than the usual neo-noir context demands. Though his screenplay is sparse in dialogue, Spielmann directs his actors to rich performances and avoids the clutter and manipulation of most thrillers, escalating tension almost solely through the characters’ turbulent emotions. Remaining in tight control of his story, creating moments of suspense, shifting dynamics on a dime and presenting us with reversals of expectation, Spielman builds his film from a flow of steady, deliberate action.

Cinematographer Martin Gschlacht does a superb job. A lot of the film’s appeal is visual and atmospheric. Spielmann’s camera clearly flavors fixed, spacious compositions slowly panning right or left near the end of a shot to reveal something new. When the camera does move, the effect is pronounced leaving some setups edging toward horror-film claustrophobia.

Revanche is a tough, slow, depressing film, but incredibly well-acted, consistently believable, and an always entertaining, modest, satisfying arty crime story. Unsettling and at the same time genuinely moving, it’s a superb psychological thriller, which proves how much can be accomplished through modest cinematic means.

- Ricky D

Visit the Criterion Collection website

Repulsion

Dir. Roman Polanski
United Kingdom – 105 minutes, B&W
Criterion Spine # 483

Warning: Here be spoilers.

Like flies to the gooping carcass of a skinned rabbit, Repulsion invites a lot of intellectual psychobabbling that usually amounts to the same things being said by different people.  We can all pretty much agree what this film, a creepy, precise exercise in claustrophobic terror, means.   That is to say that it’s a story about a troubled young woman who, trapped alone in an apartment for a couple of weeks, becomes homicidal as she battles more sexual anxiety than you can shake a stick at.

Now, if you want to hear about what a great actor’s director Polanski is and how textbook-precise the use of sound, music, surrealistic imagery and the female orgasm adds to the crumbling of one woman’s mind, allow me to point you to the succinct and intelligent essays that are part of the Criterion package, as well as the two making-of docs on the disc (especially Claude Chaboud’s great Grand Ecran segment, which uses some pretty choice behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with a young Polanski).

What I want to focus on, instead, is what this movie can potentially be about, how a fractional shift in perspective makes this a very different film altogether.  My basis for this hypothesizing is based mostly on my view of Polanski as a very deliberate filmmaker.  I imagine this is one of the main reasons he’s often compared to Hitchcock, in that there is selfom a detail that goes to waste.  I was having a conversation with a friend last night and I was telling him how, despite the surrealistic imagery and overall trippiness of the film, it’s actually quite straightforward, certainly the most straightforward of the so-called ‘Apartment Trilogy’ that includes Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Tenant (1976).  If you were to trace the arc of Catherine Deneuve’s character, Carol, then it would look something like this: she starts crazy.  She gets crazier.  Her sister leaves and, without constant supervision, she goes completely off-the-wall (almost literally) and kills a couple of creeps.

That’s all well and good but, frankly, it isn’t that interesting (to me, anyway).  The way I see it, that kind of interpretation leaves the end to be sort of this passive inevitable, where it was simply a matter of time before Carol becomes a victim of her own addled mind. But what if Carol is actually an active character?  What if, instead of viewing her as this subject we’re supposed to observe, she’s this person with whom we are meant to empathize?  What if she isn’t crazy and the dangers she sees in men and sex are legitimate dangers?  In that conversation with my friend, I told him: “Repulsion isn’t actually a psychological thriller.  It’s a zombie movie.”

His response was something along the lines of: “Bullshit.”

Now, yes, it is a stretch to call Repulsion a zombie film, but there are some interesting choices on Polanski’s part that suggest that we can identify with Carol not merely as than an unreliable narrator, but as the heroine of this story, the lone survivor navigating through a very hostile environment.  For one thing, the way he sketches out Carol’s surroundings – in this case, swinging sixties London – evokes a sex-obsessed landscape where there is no way for her to escape that which disgusts her the most – sex and men.  Carol, it seems, is the only one of her kind, surrounded by people who have totally different value systems.  She is functional, for the most part, in situations where sex and the relationships that call for them don’t exist.  But even a moment of friendship between a coworker turns from fits of girlish giggles to sullen silence the minute the coworker mentions a boyfriend.  We know now that being averse to or disinterested in sex does not make one disturbed – asexuality is alive and well in twenty-first century notions of sexual preference – but in a time where such an option doesn’t exist, where one is forced into a mold that is ill-fitting as best, horrific at worse…well, that’s a constant oppression that we watch Carol experience.

That she is beautiful aggravates her situation considerably.  I assume that Polanski cast Deneuve because her looks can pretty much be summed up as ‘angelic’, a very specific kind of blonde-haired loveliness preferred by directors who want their actresses to look like their ‘no’s actually mean ‘try harder’.  Her beauty blinds others to her disgust; they see only her etherealness and wish to possess it, treating her as though she were ‘one of them’ when all evidence shows that she is not.  Even walking down the street, she cannot escape the violating leer of passers-by.  Take the character of Colin (John Fraser), Carol’s wannabe-suitor.  If there is one act of irrationality, it is breaking down the door of a woman who persistently ignores you, so it is no wonder that Carol views him as a threat when he does that very thing and it is no wonder  that he becomes her first victim.  Same goes for the landlord who starts off angrily in search of rent money, then ends up forcing himself onto her because, well, she’s there and she’s pretty and he can take care of her, so maybe she’ll catch his drift and take care of him…  Of course, the scene ends up with the infamous razor blade, a more ‘legitimate’ case of self-defense than Colin, but in Carol’s eyes the exact same situation with a different dead face at the end.

That isn’t to say that Carol isn’t disturbed.  As the withdrawn, mouse-quiet manicurist, Deneuve imbues her character with the hushed apprehension of someone who is sitting two inches from a hot flame.  However, her fear, her murderous impulses don’t exist in a vacuum.  She is traumatized for sure and while there is much speculation as to why (certainly Polanski himself won’t explain.  “Don’t ever ask me to explain to any of my pictures,” he says in A British Horror Film, a making-of included on the Criterion release), I think it is pretty clear : she is surrounded by monsters.  Polanski has populated Carol’s world with grotesque caricatures acting as her neighbours, her suitors, her clients at the beauty salon.  Even her sister, played by Yvonne Furneaux, is the kind of highly-sexed, uncaring person who doesn’t understand Carol at all, who brandishes her illicit romance and invites the enemy – in this case, her married boyfriend – into their home.  At the end, when Carol finally goes into a complete state of shock, her neighbours gape at her dumbly, wondering how a nice girl like her could’ve gone so far astray.  What they don’t realize is that they were the ones she’s been fighting all along.

That leaves us with the final image, the only thing Polanski gives his audience that resembles a clue: a photograph of Carol’s family, with a younger Carol standing aloof, her expression impassive and cool.  What does it mean?  Was she abused?  What happened when she was younger?  Instead of viewing it as a probe into something deeper, I see the image as a summary of what we’ve just witnessed: a girl, a child really, standing alone among others, trapped in beliefs and fears that no one understands.

- Lena Duong

Visit the Criterion Collection website

Haunting, despite often being drenched in southern Australian sunlight, and that is in no small part to the understated performances within…

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

Directed by Peter Weir

Australia – 107 min. Color
Criterion Collection #29.

Hanging Rock is an actual place, an actual rock as it were, situated in the southwestern part of Australia, in the state of Victoria.  Often described vaguely as a ‘geological formation’, some light Wikipedia hunting has unearthed a more descriptive term for this rippling land mass that looks like it is part volcanic sponge, part aquarium décor: mamelon, which comes from the French word for ‘nipple’.  Would it be a bad case of over-intellectualizing if I said that this racy imagery was a significant metaphor in Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, a film that deals with, among other things, the secret longings of sheltered, pubescent schoolgirls in turn-of-the-century Australia?  Probably.  Then again, probably not.
For the film, like Rebecca before it and The Virgin Suicides after, is very much about women, women before they are women, and how their firmly-capped longings breed interior worlds so endless that, when left rampant, can overwhelm even reality.  It is a film that is as much about the fear of a young girl’s budding womanhood as it is about a tragedy that occurred one sunny afternoon in February.  Like all good, infuriating mysteries, you are left with no answers at the end, the unknowable thick over the closing credits.  What you leave with, instead, is that quiet engulfed feeling of stepping suddenly into a vastness that is misunderstood to all but for a few who are no longer here.

The story circles around the mysterious disappearances of three students and a teacher, all female, who go missing after a Valentine’s Day class excursion to Hanging Rock.  The tragedy affects the remaining pupils, their teachers and the local townsfolk deeply, but that the women disappear without a trace, without earthly clues, leave them unsettled in even deeper ways.

When we are first introduced to the girls of Appleyard College, we see them as almost too-innocent: girls who hail a statue of St. Valentine before a midday meal, girls who revel at the small luxury of being allowed to take off their gloves, girls trapped in leggings and hats and starchy white dresses as the wild bush country sky render them translucent in sunlight.  They are, for the most part, obedient, their rebellion strictly confined.   It is as though they are already ghosts even before they become immaterial, their knowledge and desires belittled by the trappings of what is expected of them as young ladies .  Those left behind are charged with the impossible task of searching blindly for creatures whose motivations are no less mysterious in their absence.  Some, like the unbendable headmistress of the college, Mrs. Appleyard (Rachel Roberts) try to treat tragedy as commonplace, resuming everyday life with dubious success.  Others, like a young Englishman who happened to be on the Rock the same day as the doomed picnic (Dominic Guard, admirably intense as one of the few main male characters), obsess over the disappearances, scouring the Rock with a determined optimism bordering on madness.  When one of the disappeared suddenly returns, she is shunned and, in one disturbing scene, attacked by her peers in a sudden outpouring of bottled anger.  They demand to know what happened, where the others have gone, what  happened on the Rock.  They don’t find out and neither do we.

The film is haunting, despite often being drenched in southern Australian sunlight, and that is in no small part to the understated performances within.  Roberts, with her clipped, Judi Dench-esque tones, makes brittleness sympathetic and Ann-Louise Lambert, as the missing Miranda, is effortlessly ethereal, truly living up to the description given to her character as being a “Boticelli angel”.  There is also Margaret Nelson, as the quiet and pained Sara, whose devotion to Miranda gives her the largest sense of loss in the wake of the disappearances.
Criterion gives you a lovely transfer, worthy of Russell Boyd’s sun-and-candlelight-drenched cinematography.  The extras are skimpy, not much more than a theatrical trailer and a brief essay by Vincent Canby in the liner notes.  It doesn’t really matter because Picnic at Hanging Rock is one of those films that work better the less you know about it.  After a second Wikipedia hunt, I discovered that the novel on which the film was based had an extra, unpublished chapter that explains the disappearances.  Plot-wise, I feel there is little merit in this and had it been included in the film, it probably would’ve been slightly less than disastrous.  It is not the kind of film that you unravel for the sake of reaching an end.  It is the kind of film you simmer in, the images embedding itself in your brain.  The image embedded in my brain is of the translucent girls, sitting on the grass in their white dresses.  They wander dream-like among the folds of the mamelon, pulled by invisible strings, pushed by invisible longings, unknowing of the fact that they will not come back.

-Lena Duong

Visit the Criterion Collection website

The greatest accomplishment of this film is how it seeks to surprise its viewers, not just with what happens but with where we place our loyalty.

Short Cuts (1993)

Directed by Robert Altman

United States – 187 min. Color

Criterion Spine #265

The Criteron Collection’s two-disc issue of Robert Altman’s 1993 film Short Cuts comes with a book of short stories – nine stories and a poem, to be exact – by the late American writer Raymond Carver, whose writings served as the launchpoint for the film.  There is much different between the sad-tragic vignettes you read in the book and the sprawling sad-tragic stories you watch on the DVD.  Pristine is not the word to describe this adaptation, but it is nevertheless nimble and faithful and, although the film’s success goes to Altman and his co-screenwriter Frank Barhydt, what a tribute it is to Carver who, were he alive when the film was released, would no doubt watch it and recognize his own face.

There is so much humanity in a film like Short Cuts that it is difficult to describe what happens without undermining its epic quality.  I describe it as ‘epic’ for though it is a film rich in minutiae that deals with all occurrences small and still, it is as complex and surprising as life itself. I imagine watching it would be very much like picking a random stranger off the morning commute and going through their underwear drawer.  What deviance lies behind the mundane, what pettiness goes on behind closed doors and what generosity and empathy can be found in such unexpected places?  Take, for instance, the story of a Jazz singer and her cellist daughter (Annie Ross and Lori Singer), who would rather escape in booze and music than get to know each other.  Or the story of the Finnigans (Andie MacDowell and Bruce Davison), so at a loss as to how their son (Zane Cassidy) could be hit by a car when they did everything to protect and love him – when they did everything, to their thinking, right.  Altman films each of the interlocking stories with an intimate distance, often covering scenes with a roaming master shot over conventional coverage to put you in the moment, to sit you in the hospital lobby or in the Jazz club or any of the other dozens of locales filled with any of the twenty-two major characters, watching as these perfect strangers go through the motions of being inescapably human.

When the film was released, Altman got a lot of flack from Carver purists for what they thought was a too-liberal translation of the stories.  Watching any of the informative, if slightly dry, Carver docs on the supplements disc gives you a sense that although these two artists never actually sat down with each other to hash out script ideas they were very much on the same page on the theme of luck and how waking up in the morning and hitting someone with your car amount to the same action in the plot of the everyday.  There is also a feature-length making-of documentary, filled with candid moments from the actors and director and even Carver’s widow, Tess Gallagher, that shows what love the stories and characters were given, what empathy shown for these fictional people.  The cast doesn’t have a weak link, and watching the actors’ interviews, you can tell that a lot of this has to do with their trust in Altman and the truth they found in Carver’s writings.  This movie, it seemed, was more than a labour of love.  It was a labour of respect and tribute to a writer who understood what it meant to wake up, go to work, go to bed and do it all again, facing the mean and the generous all in one breath.

I think the greatest accomplishment of this film is how it seeks to surprise its viewers, not just with what happens but with where we place our loyalty.  It is a credit to both Altman and Carver that we can watch these people, with their eccentric flaws and self-absorbed displays of affections, and still be in their corner when they are cruel or weak.  Their lives are not our own but they function on the same laws, so there is never anything that is out-and-out inexplicable; things just happen to them and they react.  In the introduction to the aforementioned book of stories, Altman writes that he could’ve made this film longer, that the characters and their lives and their stories could continue to fill a great many feature-length films.  That he didn’t expand, that he ended where he did, gives us the opportunity to fill in the blanks and let these characters linger in possibility -  and linger they do.

- Lena Duong

Visit the Criterion Collection website