Under the Silver Lake

UNDER THE SILVER LAKE   ***

David Robert Mitchell

2018

IDEA:  After his new, alluring neighbor inexplicably disappears, an L.A. slacker follows a series of cryptic bread crumbs to find her.

BLURB:  Saturated with circuitous chains of allusions and inter-textual quotes, the Los Angeles of Under the Silver Lake suggests the city as pastiche, as an oneiric urban space constructed from the phantoms of its cultural products. It’s a 21^st-century (un)reality as imagined by Andrew Garfield’s Sam, a sort of exemplary, semi-toxic millennial layabout whose media obsessions are all that’s holding together the tatters of his existence. Rootless, disaffected, and economically and sexually vexed, he latches onto arcane codes and patterns in a desperate bid to anchor his life and the fathomless culture around it to some semblance of meaning. David Robert Mitchell alternately confounds and affirms him: he shows Sam’s convoluted, paranoiac fixations on cryptology and conspiracy to be as crazed and ultimately otiose as they are, humorously drowning him in dead ends and absurd reveals, but he also shows that his paranoia is basically justified. Like John Carpenter’s They Live, one of Mitchell’s bountiful references, the joke of Under the Silver Lake is that the ideological mechanisms that underlie society don’t really need to be uncovered; however elaborately they may manifest themselves, they exist more or less out in the open, and we’re powerless to do anything with our knowledge other than bask in a vague sense of enlightenment. A monument to semiotic overload, Under the Silver Lake reflects a uniquely contemporary, contradictory condition of a hyper-mediated world: the feeling of being simultaneously bewildered and all-too aware.

Moonrise

MOONRISE   ***

Frank Borzage

1948

IDEA:  Danny has been ridiculed and abused mercilessly since his father was hanged for shooting a man. After he kills one of his tormenters during a fight, he attempts to evade the consequences.

BLURB:  When a film comes out of the gate with as much brio as Moonrise, the likelihood of it sustaining such vigor is fairly low. It’s not exactly a surprise, then, that this is the case with Borzage’s film. Following a jolting opening, in which the traumatic history that haunts the protagonist is conveyed in paroxysms of expressionistic shadows and alarming cuts, the film settles into a more straightforward vein as Dane Clark’s Danny tries to outrun both his past and the law. Borzage and Russell’s rich visual palette remains, but the opening’s visceral shocks are replaced by more prosaic evocations of shame and guilt, symbolized by noose-like hangings and constricted, tenebrous spaces. Still, Borzage keeps an anguished and compassionate focus on Danny, and he keeps us shrewdly attuned to his psychological state. Through its audiovisual repetitions, the film displays both an understanding of anxiety’s circular structure and the ways it finds a correlative in the narrative and formal conventions of noir. Perhaps the ultimate success of Moonrise, however, is in how it finally breaks from those conventions to give its protagonist redemptive agency. Swerving away from the standard postwar fatalism, Borzage pronounces a belief in the ability of man to absolve himself from violence and trauma, mostly with the help of women’s love and wisdom. It’s earnest to a fault, but it’s also a relieving breath of air that lifts the film’s damp pall.

Katzelmacher

KATZELMACHER   ***

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

1969

IDEA:  A group of desultory, financially and sexually frustrated friends respond with fear and contempt when a Greek immigrant enters their circle.

BLURB:  The vapid bourgeois characters in Katzelmacher spend all their time gossiping and demeaning each other, stalled in a recursive sequence of toxic lassitude. In their flat, ossified world, bigotry and moral sloth don’t have any pretty facades to hide behind. They are as stark and frontal-facing as the austere frames that hold the characters in place like mannequins stuck in molasses, unashamedly spewing forth from the mouths of those who see love, friendship, and community only as opportunities for exploitation. Yes, this is a Fassbinder film. But whereas the director’s later films couch all this misanthropy in variously baroque mise-en-scènes, Katzelmacher is the bare-bones version of Fassbinder’s despairing, unsparing worldview, stripped down to its lacerating parts. Essentially a series of static takes of characters exchanging insults, deadpanning morose aphorisms, and finally spouting all-too familiar xenophobic rhetoric, the film is as direct and pitiless a commentary on the social barbarism of the privileged classes as one could ask for. There is a brute, minimalist elegance here that is ruthlessly efficient, from the frankness of the dialogue to the curt, razor-edged edits that end each scene before the next starts the process all over. Even at 89 minutes, the effect of this repetitious, one-track vileness is oppressive – and no doubt, Fassbinder’s intent. His mercilessly forthright approach leaves no buffer room for his dissolute characters, or for us.

My Winnipeg

MY WINNIPEG   ****

Guy Maddin

2007

IDEA:  Stuck on a train full of sleeping passengers, Guy Maddin dreams of finding his way out of Winnipeg.

BLURB:  An exemplary, modestly magisterial work of autobiography and folk confabulation, city symphony and urban mythologizing, Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg seizes the spectator like a lucid dream. Carried along on relentless flurries of memory, history, and imagination, it creates a portrait of place not in its concrete reality, but in its lived and remembered experience, its psychic undercurrents and affective reverberations. In a kind of culmination of his fixation with making the past return, Maddin sculpts from the snowdrifts of his mind his most cohesive primal fantasy, reanimating his-story by answering the archaic anxieties and drives that fuel the cinematic project. Through his hypnagogic vision of Winnipeg, he creates the ultimate urban origin myth to restore, however briefly, presence and historicity to a city blurred by blizzards; analogously, to relocate his identity by enacting his self-formation, harnessing the psychical traces of his childhood and inscribing them in an external imaginary world. Although Maddin, as ever, sometimes overdoes the cuteness of his conceits, My Winnipeg has such a bottomless supply of mystery, humor, and poignancy it is rarely hobbled. There are few films that so intimately understand the roles imagination and metaphor play in how we give meaning to places, that reflect Ben Highmore’s conception of the city as a “tangle of physicality and symbolism, the sedimentation of various histories, the mingling of imaginings and experience.” My Winnipeg makes palpable the reciprocity and interpenetration of body and place, psychology and geography, past and present, one endlessly shaping the other.