Cinequest: PASSENGER SIDE

Protagonist Michael (Adam Scott) is disturbed early on his birthday by a call from his brother Tobey (Joel Bissonnette).  Tobey's car has broken down, and he begs a ride from Michael, ostensibly to a job interview.  Michael agrees reluctantly, and the two are off to not just one but a series of seedy Los Angeles destinations.  After the first couple of stops, Michael begins to suspect that not only is there no interview but that Tobey, a recovering addict, has coerced him into driving him around in search of a score.

He confronts Tobey, who confesses that he is trying to locate his estranged girlfriend Theresa, with whom he had a heartfelt phone conversation the previous night.  Theresa wants to get back together.  Both are clean now, and Tobey still loves her and is convinced that this time they can make it work.  The catch: Theresa needs time to put her emotional affairs in order and has given Tobey no way to contact her.  But Tobey can't wait.

Therein lies the problem.  Because if Tobey loves her as much as he says he does, why can he not grant her the few days she requests?  Either he doesn't trust her, or his sheer enthusiasm compels him to intrude on her life before she's ready for him.  Conversely, if Theresa is as serious about Tobey as he is about her (he's talking about marriage and kids), then how could she possibly not at least give him a phone number?  Either she's stringing him along, or the plot is simply contrived to get Tobey and Michael in a car together on this particular day.

The brothers chase around LA, racking up brief, weird encounters and collecting clues to Theresa's whereabouts that ultimately lead nowhere.  At nightfall, they find themselves near a bar and give up.  Tobey, none the worse for their failure, his perpetual beatific grin still in place, offers to buy Michael a celebratory birthday drink.  They go in, and, miraculously, Theresa appears.  She no less a cipher in her one brief scene; nothing she does or says really tells us what we'd like to know about her.  She seems anguished, but for which of several possible reasons?  The twist, when it comes, casts her in rather a bad light and also makes us wonder what motivates Michael to ferry his brother around the city all day and even out into the desert in search of her.  The questions we harbor about both Theresa and Tobey make the romantic union climax more ambivalent than satisfying.

It's an interesting choice, keeping what may be the most complex character off-screen for almost the entire film, and I'm not sure it works, although the twist itself and the scattered incidents which foreshadow it are solid.  Writer-director Matt Bissonnette might have served his story better by spending less time on the screamingly quirky minor characters the brothers run into and more on the logic behind the relationships that are what really move this road movie along. 

Despite the contrivances, however, these characters are real people with real issues, at points in their lives where perhaps getting back up to neutral has become the equivalent of "happy."  Scott and Bissonnette are fun to watch as fractious siblings.  And there is a suggestion of growth in the rigid and eccentric Michael at the end, albeit with a certain haziness about how he arrived there.  Passenger Side is an LA story, after all.  Maybe it's best that some of the answers stay lost in the smog.

Cinequest: LEFT (LINKS)

In Left (Links), even before things start to go obviously awry for protagonist Dexter, something is not quite right about his world.  The surfaces are too sterile, the furniture too perfectly arranged, the quiet, tree-lined streets too empty.  As Dexter scurries back and forth between his quiet, pleasant apartment and his quiet, pleasant workplace, he often appears to be the only moving figure in the landscape.  His life is so perfectly compartmentalized that he is spared the effort of having to really live it.

Only Dexter's pet mice stimulate his emotions.  He calls to them from the door as he arrives home every evening, the way one might call to a spouse or child.  Near the beginning, he lovingly assembles a new wheel for the mice and places it tenderly in their cage.  With humans, however, he is at a loss, interacting with them because he is compelled to, not because he wishes to.  Even with his girlfriend Stella he is restrained, more polite than passionate.  After tripping over some of her stuff in the middle of the night when she stays over, he tentatively offers to build a cabinet for her things.  When she accepts, his face is suffused with the same tenderness as his mice inspire.  He has found a way he can relate to her.

Chaos creeps into his ordered world.  The building he works in is being remodeled, and the workers are none too mindful of Dexter's boundaries.  Stella tries to clean the mouse cage and accidentally allows the mice to escape.  Mysterious scratches and dents appear on his car.  He begins to have difficulty distinguishing one person from another.  Is the woman before him Stella, or the new receptionist at work, or a doctor in the psychiatric hospital to which he suddenly finds himself committed?

 

The combined effects of writer-director Froukje Tan's careful camera work and the clean, brilliant colors of locations and props create the most user-friendly dystopia imaginable.  The restrained score by Easy Aloha's melts down into primitive electronic bleeps and bloops as Dexter's world unravels.  Warning of the perils of modern technologically-enhanced life even as it celebrates the strange beauty thereof, the film is a thematic and aesthetic successor to Antonioni's Red Desert.

When Dexter has finally recovered enough to return to work, the remodelling is finished.  Gone are his workbench, his bins of electronic bits and bobs, his oscilloscope.  Instead, he will now occupy a cubicle containing only a computer.  Slick gray surfaces have replaced colorful clutter.  In a world in which the line between work time and down time is often blurred, when our personal and professional lives are increasingly indistinguishable, the lesson is clear.  And Dexter has learned it; the alteration in the appearance of his world reflects the change in his perceptions.

In the final scene, in which he returns to the hospital to reconnect with a fellow patient--another Stella doppelgänger--we see that, in losing a part of himself, he has gained humanity and the ability to genuinely relate to others.  No longer able to maneuver on auto-pilot, he is left with only one thing to do: live.

Left is a film to be watched closely.  Tan is a master of subtlety who rewards an alert audience and refuses to indulge a lazy one.  As with Dexter's world, both the devil and the delight are in the details.

Cinequest Opening Night: THE GOOD HEART

Superficially, The Good Heart, written and directed by Dagur Kári, seems promising: an intimate, character-driven story with a pleasantly murky aesthetic, starring two strong actors. And it's not without charm. But three major issues, all of which could and should have been solved at the writing stage, undermine the performances and hamper the finished film: lack of character development, unclear motivation, and structural problems.

Kári goes to great length to impress his protagonists' characteristics on the audience. Lucas (Paul Dano) is a compassionate street waif who cares so much about others--even complete strangers--that he's unable to refuse anyone anything, although his generosity is repaid with little but grief. Jacques (Brian Cox) is an irascible bar owner with few friends and no family who needs a protege to take over his establishment for him when he finally suffers one heart attack too many.

But so much of what they do contradicts Kári's careful characterizations. For example, Lucas, the ultimate giver, attempts suicide at the beginning, thoughtlessly leaving the tiny kitten on which he dotes unprotected and uncared-for. Jacques is driven to a frenzy and a fifth heart attack when a relaxation tape tells him to envision himself on a white-sand beach. We later learn that just such a beach in Martinique is his favorite place. The inconsistencies continue throughout.

Predictably, as the story progresses, Jacques is influenced for the better by Lucas' seraphic disposition, and Jacques' molding brings out a few sharp edges in Lucas. However, too much growth happens offscreen, and the motivation for change is too often not externalized. Characters are one way in one scene and different in the next, and Kári rarely allows us to see the progression that gets them from A to B. Additionally, we never get any sense of the characters' past. What brought the gentle Lucas to the streets? Whence springs Jacques' perpetual and debilitating anger? If we were given even a hint, their initial behavior and subsequent transformations might seem less arbitrary, their personalities less one-dimensional.

That it's impossible to tell how much time is passing compounds the problem. How long does Lucas' apprenticeship last? A month? A year? The only chronological marker we are given (toward the very end of the movie) is the winter holidays, but, as it always seems to be winter in this coldly blue-lit city, that means little. Additionally, sometimes the scenes occur in a slightly illogical order, as if Kári had shuffled his index cards before writing the script.

A girl shows up. Lucas marries her immediately, despite the fact that they don't seem to be in love and Jacques hates her. The girl flirts with a customer and Lucas throws her out, whereupon Jacques professes to have liked--or at least not disliked--her, after all. Lucas becomes bitter and withdrawn, although the only reason we really know this is that Jacques tells him (and us) so.

Jacques gets on the heart donor recipient list and gives up smoking and drinking. Stripped of the armor of his vices, he becomes serene; a few scenes later, he's verging on vegetarianism. Lucas, gripping a cleaver in one hand and, in the other, the duck he had been about to butcher for their Christmas dinner, says mildly, "You've become a sissy, Jacques."

The inevitable climax is too telegraphed and too convenient to be satisfying. At least Kári didn't fall into the trap of making Lucas' ultimate sacrifice one of his own choosing, which would have pushed the story irretrievably into bathos. That what happens is due to pure chance is fitting and proper.

There's some good dialogue, although one wishes Kári hadn't predicated most of the lighter moments on the idea that there's nothing funnier than watching an old guy swear. And Cox and Dano entertain despite the script's shortcomings. Certain moments do ring true, and they cast light into the dark corners that do not. Movies, like life, are always imperfect.

Jacques Tati's PLAY TIME

I saw a 70mm print of it last Saturday at the California Theatre in San Jose, and I can't stop thinking about it.

Play Time may be the most orderly and controlled meditation on chaos and confusion ever committed to film.  Tati built an entire chunk of city, peopled it with hundreds of actors and cars, and took years to complete the portrayal of forty-eight hours in the life of the charmingly scatterbrained Monsieur Hulot.

The plot is egregiously simple, and there is no dialogue of any import.  Hulot is swept to and fro like a piece of flotsam on the urban tide: missing an appointment, getting hopelessly lost in an office/shopping complex, attending the rowdy opening of an ostentatiously chic eatery, and, finally, forging a tender and very human connection with an American tourist whose story unfolds parallel to his until their paths finally cross.

The people who connect in Tati's world are the innocent, the naive, the outsiders--the ones who are actively bemused or amused rather than passively impressed with their austere surroundings.  The American tour group is hustled from one anonymous "sight" to another, unable to tell the Left Bank from the Right, one country from the next.  Only Barbara, the woman with whom Hulot bonds, sees individuals and flowers, and feels the power lines of history running deep beneath the high-rises and multilane roadways.  To Barbara and Hulot, modern conveniences are superfluous to a happy existence.

The meticulously constructed environment is one of the main characters.  Sound is another.  An officious secretary's heels tap smartly down an endless corridor; massive glass doors thunk open and shut; traffic noise and tomblike silence are juxtaposed in aural smash cuts.  A jazz band wails.  A malfunctioning neon sign buzzes and clicks.  A door slams with a sound like a feather falling on velvet.

Time is increasingly capricious.  The simplest act seems to take an eternity, yet an entire day evaporates in the blink of an eye.  If the map were any truer, it would be the territory.

Tati eschews close-ups on any of his actors, including himself as Hulot, preferring instead to cram the frame with as much detail and simultaneous action as possible.  The city he creates is so full of life and revels so completely in its frenzied hive of activity that the viewer, rather than becoming confused or faltering under the oppressive glare of metal and concrete and glass, is imbued with a sort of euphoria.  The more chaos there is, the greater the chance of transcendance.

The film is a profoundly interactive experience.  This is not simply 1967 Paris, it is all of modern life.  Through the divisive and dystopic elements that, in a film like Gilliam's Brazil, might drive the characters apart, shimmer a vibrant and joyful unity.  In Tativille, we are all in it together.