Dunkirk

DUNKIRK   **1/2

Christopher Nolan

2017

IDEA:  By land, sea, and sky, the British army at Dunkirk tries to stave off German forces and get safely back home.

BLURB:  With Dunkirk, the gifted but chronically ponderous Christopher Nolan has attempted to make his fleetest, most pared-down film, and has half-succeeded. Running a relatively brisk 107 minutes, the film has no time to get bogged down in extraneous expository dialogue or convoluted narrative mechanics, the troubling features that have to varying degrees marred the director’s previous work. Instead, it plays out with a directness and efficiency satisfyingly in line with the underlying credo of the stranded soldiers: just stay alive. This conceit frees up Nolan to invest in a more streamlined, sinewy kind of filmmaking than he is accustomed to, the result being a big-budget war movie tempered by a kind of formal modesty and narrative economy rare in comparable projects. The problem, alas, is that he is unable to fully rein in his most tiresome proclivities, his ambitions frequently overburdening the simplicity of his story. The braided structure, for instance, in which three “timelines” interweave to highlight different aspects of the Dunkirk evacuation, feels arbitrary and ineffective, a temporal muddling of the event that doesn’t so much convey disorientation as it hobbles each strand’s dramatic momentum. Despite his inimitable technical prowess, Nolan’s inability (or unwillingness) to modulate tone and rhythm yields a monotony that further blunts the film’s visceral impact, a numbed state compounded by Hans Zimmer’s distracting, pile-driving score, which works overtime to generate suspense but has the adverse effect of seeming annoyingly redundant. Dunkirk works best when Hoyte van Hoytema’s sumptuous 65mm lensing does the heavy-lifting. The vivid teals and azures of sea and sky, set against the viscous browns and blacks of soldiers huddled in the sand or shuttling through the air, have more potency than any of the film’s rather humdrum action sequences.

Arabian Nights

ARABIAN NIGHTS   ***

Pier Paolo Pasolini

1974

IDEA:  The ingenuous Nuredin travels the desert in search of his missing slave girl, Zumurrud, while various others along the way expound on their own romantic travails.

BLURB:  Even more than the first two films in his Trilogy of Life, The Decameron andThe Canterbury Tales, Arabian Nights feels like Pasolini’s id splashed across the screen, the director’s most unwieldy, quixotic, indulgent, and uninhibited vision of insatiable erotic desire. His loose rendition of a handful of stories from One Thousand and One Nights is less a loyal historical account than an unapologetic idealization of a pre-modern past figured as a phantasmagoria of bountiful carnal pleasures. There is little denying that Pasolini, in exalting a relatively uncorrupted (by capitalism at least) era and people, tips emphatically over into Orientalism and sensual extravagance. His mise-en-scène contains majestic Middle Eastern vistas and supple, young nude bodies in equally abundant measure; unashamed nakedness bespeaks an innocent and liberating comfort with sex he mobilizes in protest of contemporary Western prudishness. The perspective is obviously highly dubious, but also gratifying – Pasolini makes no claims to either realism or good taste in his fantasy of fleshly abandon. Yet to posit Arabian Nights or the other films of the trilogy as purely idyllic retreats into the past would be a mistake. The films are as vivified by the idea of humans stripped of civilizing cultural constraints as they are haunted by the absurdities, cruelties, and hypocrisies of religious dogma and reigning structures of power. Still, in Arabian Nights as in the other films, mankind’s follies are always bound up with its irrepressible primal urges. Pasolini’s fervidly messy tales allow those urges to run (mostly satisfyingly) amok.

A Ghost Story

A GHOST STORY   ***1/2

David Lowery

2017

IDEA:  After being killed in a car accident, a man returns to his home as a ghost to check in on his bereft wife.

BLURB:  Ethereal, evocative, and pregnant with a voluptuous sense of mystery, A Ghost Story is a rumination on human consciousness that feels as fragile and wondrous as the fabric of existence it captures just a sliver of. From its first frames, Lowery lets us know that his universe is one where the eternal is enfolded in the everyday, juxtaposing shots of the cosmos with scenes of intimate domestic contentment. As in life, places are never just places, and attachments are never merely physical connections; they are imbued with and informed by history, memory, and existential knowledge, inscribed with the psychical imprints of human subjects. Lowery’s ghost is an allegory of this and more. It is a spectral emanation of an individual’s habits and anxieties, preoccupations and residencies, a manifestation of his attempt to cling to a world of which he is a mere transient fragment. A Ghost Story is, on this level, an achingly poignant meditation on impermanence that uses the figure of the ghost as a prism through which to view the imponderable flux of existence. But it is perhaps even more remarkable as a demonstration of cinema’s senses-expanding faculties. By anchoring his ghost, our point-of-view, in one location as time contracts and speeds by in front of him, Lowery offers a compelling metaphor for film spectatorship, making thematic the medium’s ability to reorganize space-time and present us with a world we are absent from. While the director’s narrative logic begins to unravel by the end – the line between allegory and serious metaphysical inquiry becomes too muddily negotiated, and his exceptional laconicity turns convoluted – his formal rigor never wavers. A Ghost Story is a slippery, diaphanous object, sometimes to its detriment, but it is also an exemplary showcase of meticulously controlled film form that invites us to bear witness to our own ghosts, including the ones conjured by the cinema.