Cinema: Unblinking Gaze

The second movie weekend of the new year is upon us, and I’m on an arthouse kick.  Which filmmakers have so inspired me to shun the megaplex in favor of more refined screen fare?  Call them the observers, inquisitive souls whose strength lies in simply being able to stand back and gaze at their subjects with an anthropologist’s acumen and a poet’s eye.

You don’t need to know a film is directed by French director Claire Denis to know that you’re watching a film directed by Claire Denis.  Telltale signs include a tendency to value her characters over the plot; long, elliptical pauses in which the environment she depicts threatens to swallow her characters whole; and a refusal to spell things out to the viewer.  Her latest effort, the nihilistic, quietly devastating White Material, returns the filmmaker to Africa, the backdrop for several of her previous films (Beau Travail, the non-Juliette Binoche-starring Chocolat) and the continent where she spent her formative years.

The setting is a present-day coffee plantation in an unnamed country on the brink of war.  The national army is fending off a rebel militia.  Its leader, nicknamed The Boxer, has gone missing.  The disintegration that interests Denis here, though, is not the one of this corrupt nation, but of the deeply dysfunctional family that has owned these java fields for generations (or as the locals regard them, colonial scum).  Zig-zagging her way through the story in nonlinear form, Denis first shows us matriarch Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert, terrific as usual) disregarding the army’s warning to flee along with the rest of the European transplants.  The message, delivered to her by helicopter, does little to lessen her resolve to tend to her crops.  “Nothing’s mine, but I’m in charge,” she says. Her ex-husband’s family’s been there for ages.  What could possibly happen to them?

After paying $100 to a gun-wielding thug for safe passage, Madame Vial goes to town, where she finds a guard outside the drugstore.  She goes to school to pick up her stepson, only to discover that classes are done…for good.  She runs into André, her ex (Christophe Lambert, aeons away from Highlander), and we realize he’s got very different plans for Café Vial than she does.  Back at the plantation, Maria has to deal with an ill father-in-law and a good-for-nothing oaf of a son (Nicolas Duvauchelle) who turns out to be impressionable in the most dangerous way possible.  Yes, events come to a boil in Denis’s nightmarish vision of a country in turmoil, but she has a roundabout way of getting there, the better for her to capture such sights as the blades of tall grass that conceal a pair of thieving boy soldiers, or the bullet-riddled bodies left in the aftermath of a shootout.

Denis builds a sense of impending doom gradually.  I do, however, wish, she had spent more time developing the supporting characters.  Did Maria’s son have to be such a clean-slate ticking time bomb? And couldn’t The Boxer (Isaach de Bankolé) amount to more than a symbol of his nation’s demise? As for where White Material stands in Denis’s filmography, I like it considerably more than some of her more impenetrable work (Trouble Every Day, L’intrus), but it doesn’t quite measure up to such career-high gems like Friday Night and, more recently, the lovely father/daughter portrait 35 Shots of Rum.  That still places this bleak tone poem head and shoulders above most of what’s currently playing out there.  It peers into the abyss, and the effect is hard to shake.

Jacques Rivette, Denis’s French New Wave mentor, has his own new film premiering locally this weekend.  In Around a Small Mountain, he casts English-born French cinema fixture Jane Birkin (Rivette’s La belle noiseuse) opposite Italian star Sergio Castellitto (Mostly Martha) in the tale of two lonely people brought together by a circus troupe touring the French countryside.  When we first see Kate (Birkin), she’s on the side of the road, trying to get her broken down jeep to work.  Vittorio (Castellitto) swings by on his Porsche and, without saying a word, fixes her vehicle and drives off.

Facts begin to emerge about the enigmatic characters.  Kate has returned to the circus following a self-imposed 15-year exile; I began imagining an abhorrent crime, like Jimmy Stewart’s character in The Greatest Show on Earth, only in reverse.  The truth is a little less scandalous than that.  Vittorio becomes charmed by a clown’s deadpan skit and begins to follow the entertainers, initially as a spectator, but it soon becomes clear that he’s genuinely interested in these people’s lives.  Most scenes start with Vittorio entering the frame as another character sits around, not doing much of anything.  They exchange pleasantries; Vittorio exits the frame. Repeat.

“We’re the last classics,” laments Alexander (aka Rom the Clown), and there’s a melancholy twinge to his remark that infuses the rest of Rivette’s wisp of a movie, the kind in which, you know, Not Much Happens.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but as the film ambled on I began wishing that Rivette were building up to…something.  “My life, it’s to move,” Vittorio confesses to Kate, who appears nonplussed by his romantic advances.  Around a Small Mountain is the kind of pastoral talkfest where even the most naïve characters utter profound truths about human nature.  It’s a pleasant diversion, but there are only so many ethereal musings I can take before jonesing for a recognizable narrative arc.

And here’s where the curious irony regarding this week’s releases comes in.  Boxing Gym is a documentary comprised of nearly wordless shots of trainers at Lord’s Gym in Austin, Texas. And yet, despite the absence of talking-head interviews or voiceover narration, I not only found it more engaging than Rivette’s film, but I also found it more revealing about its locale than many comparable nonfiction sports films.  Credit legendary documentarian Frederick Wiseman, who for over four decades has been delivering indelible portraits of American and international institutions (his 1967 feature Titicut Follies took the viewer inside a mental health institution).

The camera moves very little; any dialogue occurs in the context of a conversation between his subjects and, even so, is kept at a bare minimum.  But by simply observing these people from all walks of life exercise and spar for an hour and a half, we feel like we’ve become intimately acquainted with them.  A long-haired, goateed man dotes on his baby girl between sets.  Owner Richard Lord warns a preteen boy not to come in expecting to release his aggression inside the ring.  “You can’t come in here and start hitting people,” he advises.  A young Mexican man tells a fellow boxer he’d like to learn to play more Latin music on his accordion, and then gives him a demonstration of how to dance the cumbia.  That moment’s not there by accident: To Wiseman, the members of this gym hold the appeal of dancers practicing their craft.  Aided by John Davey’s crisp video camerawork and his own sound design (those are some very creaky ropes), Wiseman uses his unobtrusive, fly-on-the-wall approach to illustrate the titular’s location dichotomy, one that’s voiced by one of the regulars: They’re engaging in a very violent sport, but they’re incredibly friendly with each other.  For once, the lack of conflict comes as a welcome change of pace.  Mark Wahlberg, eat your heart out.

Boxing Gym and Around a Small Mountain screen this weekend only at the Bill Cosford Cinema.  For showtimes go to cosfordcinema.com.  White Material starts its limited run at the Coral Gables Art Cinema this Friday.  For more details go to gablescinema.com.

Category: CINEMA