Review: MONOLITH

We have our own stories and we like it that way. "I'll tell you a story," says a voice in the dark. It's a tale of a stalker. As the black screen slowly lightens to reveal the metal grid of a microphone's protective grill, another voice interrupts with a question. The first voice turns from an urgent confidence to an attack on the interloper and the story's credibility skids off the rails.

A young journalist, disgraced and outcast, has turned to podcasting to find a way back into the profession. She'd been loose with her fact checking in the rush to bring a criminal to justice. It backfired. The bad guy got away, aided by the case against her. So, now she must break a story that could transcend the popular medium and make her case irresistible. But podcasts are unregulated, true-crime might be fact checked but conspiracy-theories are left to grow wild. The form itself won't help her, she needs hard, substantial truth. But she's desperate and getting hounded by the boss of the syndicate she's signed up to, so she picks an anonymous email about a strange object with mysterious powers and follows it through.

And then she falls down the rabbit hole. I like this phrase. The further you go into the rabbit hole, the darker it will get and the loopier (I can never shake the association between rabbits and Alice in Wonderland). In the paranoia thrillers of the '70s like The Parallax View or The Conversation, the era of Vietnam and Watergate drove secrecy from above to the fore. The internet gave everyone a voice and the notion that all viewpoints were valid rose with instant global communication. Snopes' fact checking page grew to a reference source against this but began in the proto social media of Usenet (itself largely unregulated). By the time of 911 "truthers", Trumpian politics what was a babel of opinions became the sickening phrase the "post-truth" world. Add a world wide plague and physical isolation that ran on the internet and rumour becomes indistinguishable from news. That is the world of Monolith. It's also our own.

This might seem a lot to tackle for a little indy movie made on a pittance but there's been some clever thinking here. The journalist (not named in the credits nor, I only realise now, in the dialogue) is being hounded by the scandal she created so has fled her city flat to her parents' home in the country. On her quest to follow the story of the mysterious black bricks, she communicates with people world wide through the phone and online means, has to do a lot of problem solving remotely and even, at one point, receives a game changing piece of information in a physically delivered parcel: there's no virus but she's in lockdown.

This can only work if your central performance does. Lily Sullivan has to carry everything. We hear from other characters and see some in videos and photographs but they all interact with Sullivan and her responses. Whether she is using sly professionalism to coax information from media shy witnesses or raging to control the runaway train of information as it hurtles towards her, Sullivan's portrayal only falters when the writing does. This is a one hander and such lapses, forgivable on stage, can be glaring. However, the film always manages to regroup and carry on for its acceptable ninety-four minute run time. There is a major twist in the third act but it is delivered at the end of threads rather than in a big bamming revelation. We in the audience are asked to do some thinking for ourselves and the trust is warming.

While not without its flaws, Monolith is striking for a first feature and gives us a look into the fable making of  contemporary culture, suggesting that our ability to face the truth when we find it depends on the barriers we set against it and that the "alternative facts" we choose for our own comfort can only work if left unquestioned. Our increasingly scary world only seems to be comfortable when bolstered by wondrous technology but the truth of it might only be one glitch away from cataclysmic reality. There's a very practical reason that the journalist has based herself in the isolation of a stunningly opulent and isolated mansion but there is a thematic reason, too. That is, increasingly, the kind of shelter we will need if we don't start listening to the warnings, the inconvenient truths and lapping sea levels of the physical world. Monolith is post-truth horror.

Viewing notes: I missed this at MIFF but was pleased to see it (along with two others) screened at ACMI as a replay. It will start a short run at the Nova and Lido in Melbourne before (at an unspecified date) going to streaming (no word on which).

31 Nights o' Horror Selections #3: DON'T LOOK NOW @ 50

After losing their daughter Christine in an accident, the Baxters avoid grief by throwing themselves into their careers. They decamp to Venice where John is overseeing the restoration of a church. One day, John and Laura are lunching at a restaurant when they spy two old women looking over to the Baxters' table. When one of the women needs assistance, Laura gets up and helps out. One of the women is blind and blurts out that she "saw" young Christine at their table, laughing along with the conversation. Laura freaks out and faints back at the table. Back at their hotel, she tells John what happened which disturbs him. Laura's uncharacteristic singsong joy at hearing that the spirit of Christine was lingering on earth is going to have some serious effects.

Nicholas Roeg's film of Daphne Du Maurier's novel was written by Allen Scott and Chris Bryant who modernised the setting and kept sight of the theme of grief firmly in the centre. Without this, the director's signature time shifts and stream of consciousness montages might have ended up in a mess. But the discipline of insisting on this core allows strange moments on screen to successfully beg our patience. When John sees a funeral barge pass his ferry on the canals, with Laura in mourning black standing on deck, his confusion over events and rage over the influence of the weird sisters on his wife. His grip on events, already loosening, might well have caused this hallucination. Soon enough, we'll know the truth of it. Roeg isn't always so fortunate with his writers but here it works. 

And it's helped in industrial quantities by its location. Off-season Venice is a large, grey and sinister place where the windows are shuttered and the footpaths which could trip you into lethally cold water as easily as you taking the next step. The assignment with the church is going south after a sloppy accident on the site and a serial killer is lurking in the many shadows of the city. Then, John starts seeing Christine or someone like her, in the red raincoat we've only seen her in. The figure darts over bridges, slips into alleys and can seemingly vanish at will. Hell of a way to defy grief through toil.

When I first saw this film it was on an old black and white tv in my undergrad house. As a film student eager to touch cinema that waived convention, I saw its stretching pace and abstractions as attractive. Then came the infamous ending (no spoilers here, sorry) when it rapidly turns into a very conventional horror film for a single scene before landing more softly back on the path where it started. We couldn't shut up about it at Uni. I got it out on VHS over the Christmas break and saw it in colour (finally getting the red raincoat motif) and its standing increased with me.

Cut to decades later and I show it to a couple of friends who hadn't seen it and disaster struck. They were tired and unwilling to get dragged through such a attention defying movie. I was surprised to find that like yawning, this boredom spread to me, too. I apologised for the choice. One of them begged off and retired for the night. The other insisted we see it through. It was far too late, then. The film had stodged out to bland stultification, not to recover.

A decade after that, I saw it on a retail site in 4K in steelbook packaging at a great price and thought why not. It sat lodged in the shelf for well over a year until it came up as an anniversary film, Mark Kermode dedicated an episode of his Screen Shots podcast to it and I was brought to October, seeking all the mostly unseen 4K physical media I had. This time, I just watched, let it flow over me, enjoyed the gloomy Venice and performances of Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, including their notorious sex scene (which now comes across as a moment of happiness that marks the renewal of their intimacy after the death) and enjoyed the holy living b'crikey out of it.

Don't Look Now and even any Nicholas Roeg film, really, is not for everyone. It's glacial (but not tedious) and it is respectful to the gravity of its theme. The backwards/forwards time shifting can jolt at first but isn't hard to get used to. Mainly, though, the committed performances of the central couple in a parallel universe version of a city of carnival and gaiety which is smothering them like a giant grey blob bring us through. And as the tiny red dart that brings their grief back front and centre jut keeps flitting around in the shadows we hope that they can make some peace and that that peace will not be ugly.

Viewing notes: This triumphant viewing of Don't Look Now was done with Studio Canal's superb 4K presentation. It's a cheap rental from Google Play but is free on SBS on Demand (with ads).

31 Nights o' Horror Selections #2: THE HAUNTING @ 60

Dr Markway, an academic ghost hunter, assembles a team to investigate a mansion with a sinister history. Luke, nephew of the owners is squandering his youth until he can inherit their wealth. He's all jazz talk and skepticism but makes a good martini. Theodora wants you to call her Theo and is a strong clairvoyant. And then there's Eleanor, Nell, dowdy and sheltered, recently free of a life spent nursing her invalid mother and then gently imprisoned in her own house by her sister and young family. She thinks of the investigation as a holiday. The house is creepy, designed with a crazed irregularity. The dead are not quiet there. Nell is both terrified and at home.

Robert Wise's take on Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House came at around mid point in his seven decade career. He edited Citizen Kane for Orson Welles, made several of Val Lewton's celebrated grown-up horrors, made a credible sci-fi entry with The Day the Earth Stood Still, thrilled audiences with West Side Story and still had The Sound of Music to come. That (and more) is all before 1970. Less taught by experts than came from on the job training by visionaries, Wise was one who not only sprang free of small movie apprenticeship, he became a giant of the mainstream. But this was minus the auteurism that put the likes of Hitchcock into the common parlance. Wise just did the work as effectively as he could.

If that smacks of faint praise, take a look at this film. The rich black and white interiors, shiny polished panelling here, spotty old mirrors there, strangely angled close ups of marble cherubs that look like demons, and more deep focus process shots than you could shake a Kane at. Wise went into his cinematic workshop and chose the Welles file to fashion a setting at once gothic and traditional but constantly modern. When Markway's lines about psychic phenomena stretching from the prehistoric to daily police reports the mise en scene backs him up. The weirdness of the nocturnal exteriors of the house is mostly due to shooting them with infrared film, giving them a simultaneous dark and detailed appearance. Some adventurous audio design and physical effects like the sitting room door that starts to breathe and you have the kind of cinema of trickery that William Castle was still using to thrill and (phsycially) shock his audiences. If it were only that, The Haunting would be known to us for its ghost train gags. 

It isn't only that. Wise's strenuous work on his setting brings us deeply into the world the better to let us focus on the story of Nell. Nelson Gidding's screenplay honoured the source novel by concentrating on its narrator. The film begins with a brief change to this as Markway tells the story of the house over the scenes of death and violence. This segues into his interview with the owners. This works for the adaptation as it allows a lot of background (the arresting visuals prevent it from feeling like an information dump). Then from Nell's first scene we hear her interior monologue for the rest of the film. This is necessary. It might strike today's audiences as creaky or perhaps soap operatic but it is saved by performance.

Julie Harris is magnetic. She contains a rage so consuming it is like a separate personality, pushing through the most timid of her lines. As we see her growing comfort and assurance that she belongs in the diseased house we witness a kind of relief from a lifelong resentment. In a timelapse sequence in the prologue we see Abagail Crain age from girlhood to her death in her sickbed and it presages Nell's need to escape her mother and the possibility that she will become her. Theo's bullying taunts and the disappointment that Dr Markway proves a romantic cul de sac are worn by her as a kind of hazard gear on her way to consummation with the house. Harris' embodiment of all this puts the rest of the cast well behind. By the time of her final lines of narration she is as much possessor as possessed which is the stone that hangs off its finale.

(Aside: I'm sure David Lynch used Julie Harris appearance and performance for the character of Mary in Eraserhead. Google the titles and choose images. Seeing is believing.)

For their parts, though, the central cast do step up. Richard Johnson does what he can with his dialogue which can be a series of smug claims about his expertise. His concern for Nell warms him up, though, and he emerges more rounded than his posh nerd start. West Side Story alumnus Russ Tamblyn stretches his sharp frat boy bopper into something more relatable when he is forced to show fear. None too subtle, this nevertheless enriches the film's atmosphere. 

And then there's Claire Bloom, ethereally beautiful but soured here by arch cattiness as part of her defence equipment. Her ubermodern look is supplied by fashion leader Mary Quant which allows her jaguar-like performance to remain visible. Theo's lesbianism is not just hinted at, it provides her with one of the film's funniest lines ("you're the doctor" you need to see it get it) and Nell with a barb that at the time would have shocked. Bloom neither butches up nor nancies down for Theo. Her urbane dialogue would be equally at home at a Manhattan cocktail party which is largely how she delivers it. Her sexuality is offered here as something unremarkable in her chosen milieu but queered by proximity to the straight world. A scene in which she threw her partner out of their apartment was cut but I think that was less because it was risque than the dilution it might add to Nell's story.

Joan Fontaine remembered Robert Wise as a mechanical film maker, directing scenes with a stop watch. That was from experience not too much earlier than this production but, rather than cast doubt on Fontaine's slur, the notion of attending to the machine first does come through in The Haunting. Once that's set, though, the warmth rises and helps us through the craft of nurturing the cast. Wise might have  had better conversations with his editors or electricians but his casts move and talk through their scenes as though they are really in them. One of my comfort movie resorts if I am alone (after guests or without them, so as not to use this as torture) is to watch the sequence from when Nell enters Hill House with Mrs Dudley through to all four central characters meeting and having dinner. I want to be physically in the scene whenever I see it. 

Also, I've known folk to chuckle at Mrs Dudley's lines about the isolation of the house, that no one will come "in the dark ... in the night". This is not delivered like a campy ominous warning, it's light and spare, like a musical motif or a moment from Samuel Beckett's icy two hander Footfalls. It's not given as scary but eerie. And that goes for the film as a whole. There are some pioneering set ups and effects but if you let them happen while witnessing Nell's self discovery causing her to unravel and race to the genuine tragedy of the finale, you will feel the eeriness without need of any pointers. I watch this film in full at least once a year. I've seen it once at a cinema. I've suggested it is a kind of comforter but the more I think of it the more I wonder why that is. And then that becomes eerie.

Viewing notes: I watched my imported Blu-Ray which offers a very good transfer marred at points by white burn out but is generally very deep and clear for a film with as much detail as this. The audio needs a little cranking but it's pretty much the best presentation to date outside of a screening on 35 mm at a cinema. There was once a local dvd release but that would be long deleted. You can, however, hire it from Prime or Google Play in HD for about $5.

31 Nights o' Horror Selections #1: RINGU @ 25

Two schoolgirls on a sleepover. One tells the other a version of an urban myth. The other tells a fuller version, claiming it as experience. On the surface they're doing what kids do, outdoing each other. But these tales within a tale still have to convince even just for a moment so that the shell can convince us of its own merit. This it does and with great force. When our protagonist appears (at the funeral of one of the girls who was her niece) she finds herself picking up intel from the family and more schoolgirls about the myth which might have just proven itself true. 

Reiko, the aunt, an investigative reporter, is on the trail. She follows it to the scene of her niece's tale, experiences the triggering object (an unmarked video tape) and, in line with the myth, gets a phone call that tells her she has seven days left to live. She shares this with her ex, a mathematician for his rigorous appraisal and a psychic for his intuition, who becomes the next potential victim of the curse. They pursue the story to its roots and find, at first, a heartrending story of punished talent but a cry of rage so strong it can burn itself into the airwaves, narrow casting to any who tune in and smudging them with death.

This was the third take at filming Koji Suzuki's novel of the same name. The first two were for tv and remain obscure (never seen them). It was Hideo Nakata's lean and elegantly atmospheric slow burn for the cinema that broke Sadako's fury into the public consciousness. And then, unintnentionally but inevitably, just as in the story, the copying and miscopying began until exhaustion for the next decade. Ringu is regarded as the Ur text of J-Horror. This is distinct from Japanese horror cinema, as such, which existed for decades but does not share some essential traits with the later phenomenon. After it, the traits travelled to Korea, Hong Kong, South East Asia and kept going, adding locality to the solid core established by Nakata, until the term needed broadening to Asian horror. Its success was so solid that Hollywood ordered industrial quantities of remakes which all but obscured the originals with their normalising, point missing, bloat. After all that there is still Ringu itself, endlessly replayable, as strong as ever. So, what's so good about it?

First, it knows its own audience and starts with them. The novel and subsequent stories by Suzuki were devoured, along with the weirdo horror mangas of Junji Ito, by schoolgirls, readers sophisticated enough to want atmosphere and clear emotional arcs with their big-idea scares. The two girls at the start are all but welcoming their chief demographic into the tale. And it is all about telling and shows its muscle early by switching rapidly from tell don't show to its opposite in one scene. The remainder of the film will follow this as the reporter who tells for a living gets shown and to show, most startlingly as part of a part of a psychic chain that takes her into the past and leaves physical marks. Reiko was feminised by Hiroshi Takahasi's screenplay to cut corners from the novel and place the character in the high stakes position of a protective parent. The novel's Asakawa bears a mass of backstory and heavy complication that sits snugly in a novel where it would drag a film. As Reiko interviews the schoolgirls formally, hearing their versions of the myth, it's a kind of audience meets character encounter.

Second, Ringu plays cleverly. The race against time of the plot is never allowed to fall from our minds but we also want to know as much as we can about the cause of the curse. We're happy to follow Reiko and Ryuji all over the landscape, getting the intel they need before another time stamp appears with the strange electronic inverted bell tone to keep comfort at a distance. Only in the climactic action, which gets down to the minute, are we forced to tense up and even then it is a scene rich with carefully played pathos. It shouldn't work but it does. At other times figures appear where they shouldn't and that is played variously for shock and afterschock. Why does Reiko's young son Yoichi watch the video? It's easy to miss, not essential to the plot but freezing in its implication.

Third, it's world building. Unless it's set in a gothic castle with cobwebbed hallways, you might not associate a contemporary horror film with the kind of art direction, mise en scene that you could use to judge a sci-fi. But Ringu's Tokyo and beyond is a place of polished boarding, downcast camera angles and church-like silence between walls. The sea is huge and hungry and islands might be dry land but feel as though they might easily sink without a trace. The transmission of the curse via videotape might seem quaint now (it did, when I saw it in 2000) but it's offered as familiar technology, so much so that the notion that its carriage of the cursed images feels almost natural instead of being recorded from what was thought to be a local rural channel; it's just the VHS cassette in your handbag that holds your fate. And the images themselves, like a record of a nightmare imprinted on to magnetic tape, offer glimpses: this is a world that only feels recognisable; it holds horrors in the ether.

Fourth, it's scary. Yes, it's easy to decide you're not going to go along with a claim like that if you are not feeling inclined. I know I've hyped the comedy of Bringing Up Baby to people only to have them sit flatfaced through the whole thing. I've banned people from my home for actively ridiculing Night of the Living Dead when all I did to praise it was to emphasise the originality of the idea and the great economy of its execution. If you don'wanna, ya don'wanna. But, if you can get past the oddly contorted death masks of Sadako's victims when you are told they died of fright then you probably have the imagination to welcome the scares as they come. 

I first saw the film at the long grieved Lumiere. It was straight after work and the cinema was letting in the grinds and hammering of the roadworks outside. The cinema was about half full, I and my companion toward the front and a large group of tertiary students toward the back. We coasted along with most of it, enjoying the atmosphere and the mounting tension but once the false bottom ending was shown to be that and the real climax happened I was struck with the sensation that the film couldn't be doing what it was doing. I all but felt that everyone in the cinema was holding their breath along with me until the assault of it finished. And then, in the slow descent from that point where the final decision is made, we could easily miss quite what the character was doing. More in the spoiler section below.

Ringu at twenty-five might seem on the surface to be almost contemporary to the viewer of 2023 and after but the essentials are steadfast. The remake from 2002 missed these things, or buried them beneath megatons of Hollywood genre stock. Overstated orchestral swells, backstories no one asked for, cliches from the previous decade of swollen mainstream genre and a climax that looked like it was edited for MTV which featured a monster made so intentionally ugly that it looked like its design was dictated by a child. The original climax, accounting for shifts in the technology it depicts (change a tv screen for a painting, a '90s button landline for an old wooden box phone), could have been shot in the silent era. The takes are long enough to register the uncanny physicality and motion that unnerve the viewer and allow a flow to the progress of the scene so that it feels (despite what's happening) natural. For all the showbiz trickery of almost anything in the horror genre of which this film is a significant and willing participant, Ringu is yet pure.

Viewing notes: I saw this most recently on Arrow's stunning 4K release which has detail to gasp at, real film grain that hasn't been "cleaned up" and a 5.1 audio track that delivers strong immersion.

Ringu is available to stream in Australia on Tubi and SBS on Demand.

SPOILERS BELOW

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SPOILERS

Well, spoiler. The last lines of dialogue come from an unnamed girl who talks about how copying the tape lifts the curse. So, this sounds like one of the interviews that Reiko was conducting with the schoolgirls. There is a narrative point made toward the end of the film by which Reiko understands about the copying. It's not ambiguous; with the help of an apparition she twigs. This means she didn't already know it before her husband met Sadako for the first and last time. But if it was in there among the schoolkids' testimony then it's surely something she would have recalled (like when she was frantically filling buckets of water at the bottom of the well to lift the curse). Yes, I know it's just a bit of over-egging to let us know in case we missed it but it's occurrence just before the credits roll makes a sore thumb of the statement. 

Oh, the plural was right all along. Someone on a discussion group came up with this funny but true observation: Reiko is presented as a bad mother at first but becomes a bad daughter in the final scene. She's barrelling down the highway toward her father's place to get her son to copy the tape and give dad an eyeful, passing on the curse to him. Sure he can just copy it and pass it around to anyone but his sparse rural community is going to run out of people soon and will have to set up a kind of Wicker Man community, cursing everyone they can find. Well, she might have just given it to someone in a hospice and let time and Sadako have their way and create a terminus but how long is that going to last. Thing is, even with all this in operation the thread as is, remains doomladen and only serves the film itself.

Oh, I should point out that none of these objections marrs my overall appreciation of the film; it remains one of my favourite horror movies of all time.

CUBE @ 25

A small group of people wake up in a cubic room whose walls are backlit circuit boards. This is after a prologue which shows us that there is a system of such rooms, accessible through doors in each wall, and some of them have fatal traps. None of the characters can recall why they were chosen to be there, or when they were reclothed in the prison-like overalls that bear their names. What is it? A survival game, a sadistic futuristic jail, a Hellraiser-ish afterlife? There no clues given beyond the threat of their annihilation if they chose to enter the wrong rooms. They try to reason their way to action but if they were chosen for their particular abilities they might also have been chosen for their snappiness. This is a crew that fights as easily as cooperates. Gonna be a long haul out, if out is actually possible.

Vincenzo Natali's puzzle sci-fi demonstrated how much a little imagination and a small doubled set could do at a time when mainstream genre cinema was growing so lavish that one look through the weightless early CG would reveal how insubstantial all that money could really look. At the end of the decade this reached its Olympic scale when George Lucas returned to his Star Wars realm and attempted to wipe the table of all else. The problem with that, though, was that smaller and smarter sci-fi was showing it up. If the remake of The Haunting was embarrassed by The Blair Witch Project then The Phantom Menace didn't have a patch on The Matrix. Just before that, was Cube which could have been a Twilight Zone episode from the 1960s but clocked in at a tidy ninety minutes and spoke volumes with those two joined boxes for its set.

While we aren't whisked away to galaxies far far away we are invited into the intellects of people who see patterns and meaning in what they are given. They are also, daringly, to be almost right before big mistakes guide them to develop their thinking. The conflicts that flash up like old middle European states are where the flesh, blood and nervous systems appear to threaten the progress that requires concentration and collaboration if they are to survive.

The sci-fi enters through the technology but also the possibilities of why it was created and used. Reasonable propositions only lead to fearsome conclusions and the group's conspiracy-monger freely shares her every theory whether plausible or absurd and this, as it must, lights a few emotional fuses which attack the life-affirming unity. While this is not allowed to cause the kind of incredible mass delusions as it did decades later when a pandemic infected everyone with a lot of impotent rage, an internet account and paths to echo chambers, its inclusion in the dialogue is incisive. That the abstruse claustrophobia of the situation could fuel both fanciful antagonism and physically violent self interest is part of the sadness of the story that prevents it from feeling like an old tv episode. Whether it is entertainment for the rich and powerful or a machine working well beyond its purpose in perpetual motion, the bipedal lab rats might well create their own doom.

A scenario like this is fraught with the need for rapid communication of plot points as well as pauses to examine puzzle solving as well as allow for interpersonal conflict. This gives Cube its fairly brittle, overstated performances. On the other hand, I don't know how well any of its audience would do at being kind and reflective. Maurice Dean Wint often gets mentioned as a histrionic action figure and his eye rolling and grimacing can approach parody but his provision of real threat serves to negate this response. His counterpart David Hewlett, a penpushing nihilist who might know more than he's letting on stretches our patience with his eagerness to find everything ironically hilarious. The paranoid Nicky Guadagni works probably the hardest of all to provide depth beyond her refulgent outbursts. Nicole de Boer plays young and of shifting loyalty but her intellect is believable. Once, you accept the stridently drawn roles you'll be ready to watch such development as the desperation in the story permits. 

Cube is a marvel of economy, a fistful of big ideas in a tight package, the very thing that sci-fi boasts at its most effective. The elegance of its design whereby different rooms are lighted with their own colours would impress if it were not that it is so organic to our experience of the setting from the prologue onward that we quickly accustom ourselves to it. Add a well designed audio scheme and you're there with them, locked and loaded. And this film plays out again and for as many times as you might revisit, as freshly as you first saw it.

Review: PAST LIVES

Three people at a bar. An Asian woman is flanked by an Asian man and a Euro-American. An offscreen pair speculate on the relationships of the three. They're guessing and giving their reasons and are no wiser than we. Then we flashback twenty-four years and kilometres of ocean to Seoul where a young family is preparing to emigrate to Canada. The older of the two children, wants a western sounding name. Her father gives her such and it is close to her Korean one, Lenore or Nora. Later, we see Nora walking with her school friend Jung. He's just beaten her at something academically and she's sulking. Later still, they're teenagers and getting closer. Then she's in New York as a young adult, beginning a literary career and he's slogging through his mandatory military service. One day Jung calls out through his Facebook page and she answers.

This sound like a lot of plot but plot is not what fuels this film. It is of the passing years and slides along in a near daily fashion, letting us know that what these people are going through, the decisions they are making about their careers and relationships are not above or outside of time. Time is a central concept in this story. It's not just the river of it carrying these people along or coursing past them, it's also in a Korean concept that refers to reincarnation and its effect on people gravitating toward each other across lives to eventually join, a kind of predestination by practice. The more Jung and Nora comminate with each other through their laptops the more remote the idea of their pairing becomes. Nora's career furnished her with a marriage while Jung drifts in various jobs back in Seoul. Jung's determination for an adult reunion with Nora finds him struggling with his own motivations. 

The stunningly rich photographic pallet of the film shows New York to one side of its iconic towers so that it seems little different from similar images of Seoul. Meanwhile, after Nora calls a moratorium on their communication the twelve year silence finds Jung still drifting and Nora advanced as a playwright in a marriage that not only looks happy enough but is respectful enough for the pair of them to talk candidly about Jung's imminent visit to New York. When that happens, the weight of the rest of the film which felt so slight begins to press and we begin to discover with the characters what has become of them through these long stretches.

If you read a synopsis of this and thought it sounded like a rom com or just a muted love story you'd be wrong on both counts. This is slow cinema. Not boring, slow. Slow like Bela Tarr or Jean Luc Godard who want you to take in an think about time and place as they fix their gaze on a wall or dip in and out of focus on a wagon ride for ten minutes while you consider where you are and what you've seen. You might well find yourself resisting the slowness to begin with. You really could have a go at conjugating verbs in a language you haven't spoked since high school, and miss almost nothing. But, if you haven't been checking in you'll miss the emotional seizure and breakdown of the final phase. All those long takes with so little dialogue or decisive action, they were the living we had to taste before we meet this strange junction. Then, with an other than obvious thought introduced in dialogue, something that turns the whimsical notion of the reincarnation concept into something more like a sentence, we understand and it is not what we expected nor (I'd bet) what we wanted.

This beautiful and powerful piece is the kind of essential reminder of cinema as a blank screen to be filled as film makers will, an unexpected gift that delights with both its surprise and the surprise that you needed it.

HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER @ 50

 

The drifter of the title rides slowly into the town of Lago and then through it, attracting the attention of everybody he passes. He tethers his horse and goes for a drink at the saloon where he is approached by the local gang. He shrugs them off and then, when they interrupt his shave, shoots all three. Oh, on the way to the barber he responds to the coy attention seeking ploy of the local blonde bombshell by hauling her into a barn and raping her. Is that a sign of consent at the end of the act? This movie is not about to make it easy for you. If that sounds like the shock of a Jodorowsky you're in the right era but you've got he wrong guy. This is Clint Eastwood's second feature and first western, in the guise of the man with no name which had strung him through some fine work by Sergio Leone.

Eastwood had already added to that enviable apprenticeship with Don Seigel's Dirty Harry and The Beguiled where his characters' ethics were of the antihero and not always in the cool sense of the notion. In Drifter he stands way outside all he had previously done. Then again, who does in this story? All the officials and business owners of this town (including the phantom-like mining company who only appears through its connections to the influential townsfolk) are venal and violently interested. This town, that sometimes seems to be populated by about ten people and sometimes about a hundred, has only the appearances of an outpost of the "honest world". There is a spoilable reason for this but until you understand it you might think you've entered a forebear to an AI approximation. The apparent order and holders of order have no integrity that survives a shallow peep.

So, when he is asked to assist with his gunfighter chops to help the town against the approach of a vengeful trio, he accepts on the proviso that he gets what he wants and does as he pleases with impunity and no charge. Those bad guys? Well, they were part of the town's protection racket against the government who sent in a marshal who the threesome whipped to death in the street. If you're thinking of mining companies and their political reach these days, keep thinking it. So, No-Name ploughs through the town's wares and patience, sowing resentment in the men and attraction from the women, and he trains the able bodied to shoot straight from hiding places. And the localised apocalypse keeps advancing. 

Really, you need that level of plot detail to get through this one. No-Name's picaresque trickery and japes break into criminality without an ethical speedbump and if you know your early literature you might see him as much a medieval morality test as a wild west figure. To this end Eastwood depicts his character has having even less muscular substance as any of his Leone roles. Lanky and soft of foot and often shot from below, he moves and poses like an animated scarecrow. There's a spoilable reason for that, too, but it has its roots in an odd dream sequence in which he visualises the bad fate of a character he shouldn't know.

If the comedic or salacious moments feel less funny or sexy than they might it's only partially due to the vintage of the piece as a film but more so to that Decameron-like amorality I alluded to before. High Plains Drifter is almost as strange a western as El Topo. It has better manners than Jodorowsky's movie but El Topo can claim a lot firmer an ethical ground. That is, until you get to the end where if it doesn't quite forgive his worst acts at least explains them. Is that enough? Up to you.