I've been trying to balance my film-viewing with my work and making time for more literary fiction. I recently read The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. It's an upsetting book, but I appreciated that it doesn't seem like it's trying to go out of its way to shock you. It helped me understand why I got that sense from Alex Garland's Men. The Sparrow is a blunt instrument, but it's horror arises from an underlying, functional world. It also dwells a great deal on the aftermath.
The above picture is from the 1943 adaptation of Ordet. Naturally, I was curious about it because of Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1955 adaptation. I was surprised to learn how much Dreyer cut from Kaj Munk's play.
The Counselor (2013)
I saw this more as a Cormac McCarthy movie than a Ridley Scott movie. The outline of the story is quite similar to that of No Country for Old Men: a capable but naive man tries to illicitly enrich himself by stepping outside his ordinary life and is hunted down by people more brutal than he can imagine. This isn't the outline of Blood Meridian, but I think that book proves the point in a different way. Judge Holden is exaggerated, unrealistic, and terrible. He's an idea, an idea that is a "great favorite," will never
die, and which has caused immeasurable suffering. His role in the book isn't to suggest anyone like him could actually exist, but to represent something people will always strive for, despite the impossibility of achieving it and the destructive consequences of failure.
The Counselor and No Country for Old Men underline that those who try will fail, and drag down everyone else with them. And we can't even choose to simply be content with the ordinary, parochial values we start out with, because there will always be wannabe supermen whose inevitable failures to transcend the world unleash chaos on the rest of us.
Revolution +1 (2024)
This film's central character is called "Kawakami," but he is plainly supposed to be Tetsuya Yamagami, the assassin of Shinzo Abe. Some scenes depict Yamagami in jail, envisioning rain and apparitions from his past inside his cell; these alternate with scenes from Yamagami's life, such as the suicides of his father and brother and his mother's involvement with the Unification Church. The real-life Yamagami's motive for assassinating Abe was Abe's promotion of the Unification Church, which he blamed for ruining his family's life by indoctrinating his mother and taking over $700,000 from her in donations.
Revolution +1 certainly depicts a family's life being ruined, but it doesn't depict this as a sequence of events that lead by necessity to the assassination. Yamagami's reason for killing Abe in this film is not just revenge, but "to become a star in the sky": it's to put some purpose to the suffering, to find something that can unify all the different tragedies in his life. He notes, at one point, that the seemingly disparate views of conservatives in Japan seem to be able to unify around a hatred of the left. He reminisces about a man who fired a gun in an airport in the name of freeing Palestine, and says that man became a star in the sky.
He asks himself what kind of star he will become. He ponders Abe's role in the Unification Church and builds up a narrative of what happened to his family. As of now we have no way of knowing whether this movie really reflects how Yamagami thinks of himself. But this film's points are still valuable. Yes, the Unification Church has ruined lives, and yes, Abe was partly responsible for that. And we all seek to narrativize our lives somehow. This is exactly what cults like the Unification Church take advantage of. This film depicts a man struggling to do it on its own--no cult controls how he narrativizes, but he doesn't have anyone to help him in earnest either. This is a very lonely film.
Despite the title, there is no "revolution." What would that look like? Maybe, like helping Yamagami form the narrative he longs for, but without cult-like exploitation and manipulation, facing reality instead. I don't think this film does that or indeed demonstrates that it's possible, but maybe it would be worth a try.
The Sacrifice (1986)
The long takes in Tarkovsky's films give the viewer a degree of immediacy relative to the characters and their environments. His movies have distinctive, complex textures--flowing water, aged wood, cracked cement, long grass that blows in the wind. Sometimes there's tension between immediacy and the films' representations of the characters' wandering thoughts. In The Sacrifice, there's another, more troubling tension.
The longing for immediacy goes hand in hand with contempt for big ambitions. Tarkovsky praised the contentedness of "simple farmers"; Stalker ultimately depicts the failure of characters who try to embody concepts, and who have tried to replace faith in God with outsized faith in themselves. The main characters of this film, with their philosophical musings, seem to agree with this Dostoevskian streak and find some satisfaction living in a place they believe to be remote.
But in the end, the immediate isn't enough in The Sacrifice. This is a film for a connected and post-nuclear world, where no place is remote. Universal concern becomes possible and necessary for any real existential satisfaction. The film still has anxiety about individual powerlessness in the face of such a world and betrays doubts about any person's ability to fully grasp it. But once Pandora's box is opened, its curses cannot be put back inside.
The Zone of Interest (2023)
I watched the discussion surrounding this movie evolve. I saw praise early on, followed by backlash at the intellectual uniformity of the praise, plus criticism of the movie's lack of subtlety. I saw some responses that found the movie as an expression of something in the vein of Adorno and Godard about the failure of art to face up to the Holocaust, or the inability of cinematic form, as it happens to have evolved, to represent the Holocaust the way it needs to be represented. I have always been skeptical of the most sweeping formulations of these ideas. I don't think meaning inheres in a form all by itself. It can only come from interplay between form, viewers, and the backgrounds the viewers bring with them.
Others said the specific forms this movie adopts are too easy, checking boxes of elements that are supposed to be unsettling rather than actually being unsettling. I considered this along with what others were saying about it. There is a legitimate concern that films which adopt a conspicuously “not manipulative” mode end up being manipulative toward certain audiences, i.e., the kinds that like to pat themselves on the back for dispreferring “manipulative” films.
I found this intriguing, but it seemed like everything I saw about this movie described it simply by intellectually stating a thesis. That isn't enough to explain the many choices that necessarily go into making a movie. I found I was unable to get any impression of what this movie was like from criticism.
It's a highly schematic film, governed by fairly obvious rules. Hedwig's speeches about prosperity or Rudolf's corporate pencil-pusher talk to his superiors and colleagues are also quite obvious. On the other hand, I liked the uncanny valley effect and booming sound of the thermal camera scenes. The tension between the sympathetic actions portrayed in those scenes and their distancing nature of the immediate, sensory qualities left a bigger impression on me than anything else in the film.
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