Should have seen it coming.

Prick Up Your Ears, which was Halliwell’s suggested title for the film for the Beatles that Orton came under contract to pen, is an intelligent and ruminative look at a married couple and their difficulties, and how the instability of one both caused loyalty and dissolution (oh so often it does). The film contains a somewhat awkward structure, framed as an investigation into the biography the film is based upon, which allows the literary agent (a fantastic Vanessa Redgrave) to provide some slippery meta-commentary on the action we’re seeing her participate in (for example, when Joe Orton takes her, Peggy, to receive an award instead of Halliwell, who must continue to pretend to be the ever-more successful Orton’s personal assistant). The author of the biography, John Lahr, is portrayed as an absorbed writer with his own “personal assistant” suffering some burgeoning animosity of her own (his wife, who may or not be a construct of the screenplay — all biographies that I can find note that he was married in 2000, with no prior marriages — which suggests more about Lahr than it does the subject of his book).

It’s also a great showcase as to how a complexly layered series of timelines (before Orton and Halliwell met, after they met, before & after success, before & after their deaths, etc) can be jumbled together in a coherent way without obvious and pandering title cards to orient the audience(!). Small physical details that just exist are enough to signify change, for example, take note of the scene split across the beginning and the end of the film, where the only acknowledgement of this is Orton’s jacket, and yet you know and feel plenty comfortable with this, or the varying degrees of completion to which Halliwell’s collage covers their bedroom wall (filmed in Halliwell and Orton’s actual flat, barring the death scene).

The performances are also fantastic, with Gary Oldman once again disappearing almost completely, and the warmth of Alfred Molina’s most recent performances (such as in An Education) giving his performance here an even greater sense of desperation to foster his connection to his lover as Orton slips away into success.

Factory 420 was in large part a munitions factory, and contemporary China finds itself changing, becoming more and more of an economic presence in the world, and so the factory switched from munitions to jet engines, but still remained inviable.

Beautifully shot, the film’s individual elegies are poignant. And yet, the one thing that detracted from this film for me was the fact that I knew some of it wasn’t real. It’s a “documentary style” drama, which mixes actual accounts and fictional ones performed by actors (occasionally distractingly so, in the case of Joan Chen). Now, with exception to Ms. Chen, I didn’t really know what was real and what wasn’t, and that is perhaps testament to the plain and realistic way Zhang Ke Jia went about this project: little flourishes, stark images of the factory in decline, and letting the stories stand for themselves. But what of the stories? Who is real and who isn’t, and why are they being presented in the same fashion, the same venue? Is there a “dramatic” truth that is attainable only through performance? But what of the realness that pervades most of the film – is it real or constructed? The best answer would be it doesn’t matter, but why play these head games when the real is so good? To what effect is achieved by abutting fiction with experience? Is the intention to decry the naturalness of experience, and prove that fiction is as powerful? Does that make the stories sit second to the narrative agenda?

With Joan Chen’s story, it became unforgivable and disingenuous. Her monologue recalled for me Werner Herzog’s notion of the “ecstatic truth”, but I can’t think of any Herzog film (Dan, help me out) where he so brashly combined the real with fiction, rather he takes the approach of exploding truth to extreme proportions, instead of minimizing fiction to make it seem real. Joan Chen is the one point where he comes close to this “ecstatic” sense of truth, where we have Joan Chen talking about working in the factory and being teased about looking like an actor, “Joan Chen”, in the film Xiao Xua, and how this resemblance followed her throughout her career at the factory. At this point, we have to ask a number of questions: 1) is this entirely made up or is 2) Joan Chen playing a Joan Chen look alike? If 2), why is Joan Chen playing her? If 1) how does this serve the story apart from layering fictions upon fictions and distracting us from actual stories that have the benefit of having happened? In the other Zhang Ke Jia film I’ve seen Unknown Pleasures, he employs this kind of meta-game as well, when the principle actors, running from the law, ask a bootlegger if they have any Zhang Ke Jia films. Fine, in that film, it’s a joke (that suggests a stern control of cultural artifacts – yes, indeed, the bootlegger has no Zhang Ke Jia films), but here does it tell us anything at all about what these people are going through?

Zhang Ke Jia’s style is admirable (the bike going up the hill scene makes Unknown Pleasures worth watching alone) – it is among the most deliberate and patience styles I’ve seen in any modern filmmaker. Much of his film is about the portraiture of presentation, and how self-awareness and acceptance grow out of unchangeable forces. One question the film fails to answer but reflects largely on the cultural changes modern China is undergoing is that the closure of this factory is decimating this area. People are losing their jobs and having to scale back, move out and find new work. If everyone is gone, who will live in the luxury condominiums? Joan Chen, perhaps.

Taking requests from Mrs. Wilberforce.

I admired the Tom Hanks performance in the Coen Brothers version, for the way he twanged and tingled his lips around his words about waffles forthwith and whatnot. But here Guinness manages to be as absurd and silly and yet not make the whole enterprise about him (the whole supporting cast in the Coen Brothers version were On!, and not in a particularly good way). Here, everyone falls into certain archetypes, sure – the muscle oaf with transient parental figures, the hard-edged criminal hesitant to Do the Deed, the mastermind who intellectualizes listlessly in the face of a dissolving plan, etc. The real star, of course, is the little old lady, Mrs. Wilberforce (Katie Johnson). Always doting on the young men she lets her room to (they plot a heist under the ruse of a practicing string quartet), she delightfully encourages the boys in their soulful performances of andante passages and pizzicato.

When she finally does find out what’s going on under her nose, she turns into a stern, trusting parent sure that the boys, as lead by Professor Marcus (Guinness), will ultimately do the right thing. As they squabble under her nose once more, they each draw straws in an attempt to bring about their escape from the lock and key of Wilberforce, and attempt to navigate the lull of the cello case filled with their loot. They achieve varying degrees of success.

Peter Sellers, in one of his first big roles as Mr. Robinson (Harry), is fairly restrained but possesses an explosive energy and natural affinity for physical comedy, which he would make great use of from Dr. Strangelove through the diminishing returns of the Pink Panther films.

The Blu-Ray disc for this film is great. The format really shines with older films that have never really looked good because of poor prints and lackluster restoration. A Blu-Ray film restored properly, such as this one, adds layers to the film that were barely recognizable before. Buildings and roads achieve a texture in detail that was only fuzzy, soft incoherence on AMC in the past. The DVD is probably just fine, but if you have the opportunity, you should see this on Blu-Ray. Additionally, the disc is packed with alternative language tracks and subtitles, so if you have anyone attempting to learn a foreign language but hesitant to sit down and see some criminals face off against an old lady in 50′s bone dry English comedy, then perhaps you can entice them with the Norwegian subtitles.

Tom Hanks upon discovering the secrets of the plot.

And while Angels & Demons, thankfully, does not feature a man jumping out of a bathroom window of the Louvre onto a truck passing by below or the audacity to ask us we believe that it could happen, but it is the same rough template: Professor of Symbols, Robert Langdon, rushes through the Vatican and Rome (are they serious? “We have four minutes left!” and then in the next scene, they’re driving from the focus point of the shot to another cathedral, and when they get out of the car they say, “One more minute – we have to hurry!”) to trace the ancient illuminati to their Illumination Chapel of Doom.

Robert Langdon and his followers (be they the gruff police commander who May Have A Motive or the Too Ambitious Cardinal Strauss With a Suspicious German Accent) rush from scene to scene, reciting Dan Brown’s Encyclopedia Britannica entries on History. Two things improve the merry-go-round this time: 1) they are running while making the aforementioned recitations and 2) there is a time-line forced into the plot (the preferati will be killed one at a time at 8, 9, 10 and 11, with the entirety of Rome being exploded by an anti-matter bomb at midnight! This gives the viewer of the film the ability to gauge where in the story they are, and know approximately when what will be revealed (for instance: the director’s name, in the credits).

Angels & Demons is the opposite of something I said about a play last week, or maybe it’s not the opposite so much as a bastard cousin. Before seeing “Next Fall” on Broadway, and in response to a suggestion that it might be a little too obvious, a gay couple – one an evangelist and the other an atheist – well, what else can they talk about? I said that there’s nothing more satisfying than a play of ideas. Compare “Angels in America” with “The Philanthropist,” for example. They’re both rompish fantasias, but only one of them has meat on its bones. I would submit that the same thing holds true for movies, and perhaps that’s why I will blindly watch anything The Criterion Collection puts out as essentially my own personal recommendation engine. Does Dan Brown want to reveal something about his subjects, or are they simply window dressing? Maybe Angels & Demons is just window dressing, and that’s probably why it works better than The Da Vinci Code because it lacks the pretension of “blowing the whole thing wide open.” But in choosing to be less (or simply being restrained by the talents of Brown), it only just achieves the measure of its mark.

Something about thrillers that is a pretty routine disappointment – early in the film, Eugene mentioned something that clued me in on a detail I wasn’t really paying attention to, but immediately everything fell into place. And I asked him, “Oh, so you’ve figured it out already?” I hadn’t until he said something, and for awhile it seemed like I was wrong, and this made me enjoy the film more. Until the film decided to prove to me that I wasn’t, and so its surprise was a harbinger of sameness that shouldn’t disappoint and yet, how it falls quietly and in the same manner as all of its brothers like a parachute from the sky in the shadow of an anti-matter explosion (← spoiler).

I literally just found myself tapping out a paragraph ruminating on the ridiculous nature of this kind of thinking. When did I become such a luddite? Isn’t the great part of this film that it actively engages us in these kinds of thought experiments? It’s a film about humanity at its most base level, and if you abstract yourself out from the “plot,” you have a perfect everyman in the shape of Caden Cotard that is successful because he’s the “director”, which is the role we all take in our lives. Sometimes we wish we had someone to give us notes that tell us how to feel, but if you want to be Cartesian about it, it’s just us. Usually stories about writers bother me, and while this isn’t a story about a writer, it is ostensibly about the insular creative world – but Cotard’s problems are universal, and the play he’s putting on, as it gets larger and more ‘real’ and more about the lives we look back on and the regrets we had and still have, becomes less about the director than the directed. Caden frequently phones Hazel’s cell, and even though she is now 60, 70 years old, the voice on the voicemail never ages. Does this suggest that Caden is constantly calling deeper and deeper into the nested warehouses, to the point where Hazel and he had a chance? Or does it suggest that regrets do not age and that to be over them, we must simply let them go?

The biggest flaw in the film for me is the burning house of Hazel, which is a detail that makes me recall what I thought of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and a Charlie Kaufman script being directed by Michel Gondry: It’s a little like adding sugar to coke for flavor. And while there are a couple of funny moments with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Samantha Morton acting while the house burns down around them, there’s just something a little too present (or if you’re looking for a Manhattan-bound 4-train ten-cent word, “centered”). It’s meant to suggest that choices we make early in life vibrate throughout our whole lives (when Hazel states her worry about the fire to the real estate agent, she tells Hazel it is difficult to choose how we die). A better metaphor to this in the film is the suggestion that every choice we make is connected to a thousand threads, and when you pull just one, everything shifts to accommodate.

This is well beyond the post-modern games that Kaufman plays so freely with in the last third of the film. Things really start to bog down as we see Cotard and Hazel trailing Sammy and Tammy (the second Cotard and Hazel) trailing the third ones, with them acting out a scene rife with gauche artifice. At this point, we see Cotard coming to realize who he is, with the gender swap with Ellen, whose bedmate is Eric which makes us recall Olive’s death scene and has the issue of pulling us deeper into the warehouses, since it doesn’t appear as though this switch has happened yet, so it must be “above”. The gender swap seems to suggest the animus, which comes just before self-identification in Jung, but also corresponds to the ‘mirror’ stage in Lacan, and so it makes sense that the narrative becomes uncontrollably slippery (10¢), disjointed and senile.

I found myself, having recently listened to a podcast on identity in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, thinking a lot about how our conceptions of ourselves form our identities. Cotard really likes to clean, and while he doesn’t necessarily think all of his organs have gone missing or that he’s a walking corpse, he doesn’t really appear to get much self-awareness until he meets Sammy (who knows more why Adele left than Cotard himself). But even if Cotard isn’t in a warehouse at the beginning of the film, there’s plenty of evidence that suggests he’s only one in a line (Hazel is reading Proust in the box office, where a Dr. Cottard makes several appearances). So there is a Cotard that came before, several that will come after, and at each level life is written and knowable, but at the same time uncontrollable because it has already happened.

She speaks sometimes obliquely, sometimes directly about her memories, and this is the structure of the film – passing back into Varda’s experience, we see the genesis of the French New Wave (a blanket term for a group of French directors experimenting with narrative in the 50s and 60s, such as Godard, Truffaut, Charbol and, naturally, Varda – they created long, elaborate tracking shots, the film as real-time (24 owes a great debt to Varda!), the freeze frame (see the last shot of The 400 Blows for a shot that was truly shocking in its day that has become so familiar it’s difficult to see it was nothing but cheese) and so on). Unfortunately, much of Varda’s excess comes in the form of her attempting to position herself among these other filmmakers, and those of the Rive Gauche film movement to which she is retroactively closer placed (along the likes of Alain Resnais), who were a little more experimental. And while it’s true she’s oft-considered the grandmother of the French New Wave, she does little to give insight into the movement, rather than rattling off the various connections and bon mots she knows of these incredibly influential (herself among them, of course) filmmakers, and it creates a list-like feeling of name dropping that distracts from Varda herself.

But others – she is nakedly emotional, and the closeness one feels to her in these moments is unlike any other documentary I’ve seen. Witness the scenes where she speaks of her final collaboration with her husband, Jacques Demy, who was dying of AIDS. Or the scene where she takes the children of the actors she used in La Pointe-Courte, and has them push a cart through the fishing town of the film, watching their parents in the film itself walking along the same area they now walk, at sunset. It’s scenes like this we feel we get to know the most about Varda, what makes the film so successful is not the “she lived, she filmed, she knew” format of your typical biography, but the insight we get into much of her creative process, and the way she constructs these scenes, interrelated and pointing at each other, shedding light on one another, and giving us a clear view of the ocean behind us, its waves coming closer to us for a moment, and then receding back out into the blue, only to come and come again.

The actresses portraying Judith and the mystery woman, Alice, are both compelling and anchor what could be an interminably long third act with some raw emotion. It’s enough to distract you from the fact that you’ve seen this before, but not enough to be entirely riveting, just because once all the cards are on the table they have so little to work with. The central argument that Alice and Judith spar over is one of guilt – Judith is a former terrorist, and her actions gave Alice an irreparable childhood, so now that terrorist Judith has been discovered 25 years on, with a new unsuspecting family, should she still be forced to pay due diligence? Alice thinks so, and persists – at first terrorizing the family by posting Judith’s wanted poster all over their grape fields, and being an all around menacing presence. But it’s the more emotional appeal to Judith’s family members that cause her to finally confess the truth of the matter – it was an accident, and while she accepts responsibility for the action – it keeps her up at night – she feels as though she is no longer responsible.

The film’s ultimate position is betrayed by the end of the first act, when we discover what is in the little tin. If family is so important to Judith, why does she think there is a time-lapse on personal responsibility, particularly to the family members that you choose to protect. For those that you don’t, well, the title kind of tells you about them, doesn’t it? It’s unfortunate that the film gives Alice a brief view outside of her shell at the end, where she offers a way out for Judith other than the one that we expect. She’s already too much of a deus ex machina, here, persisting and persisting for the sake of it. The actress, Katharina Schüttler, is able to give these scenes where she is earnest (and So Germany, as Judith’s new husband, observes of Alice and his wife) a real gravitas, but even still by the time we’ve heard the argument put out in the same terms over and over again, we kind of feel like throwing out the lamb shank with all those champagne bottles, too.

And yet, the coming of age aspects of this film are handled exactly such as they are: a little droll, pretty typical which provides a lot of space to maneuver the moral murkiness of Jenny’s predicament. The film makes no bones about the symbiotic relationship that exists, though Jenny’s side of the relationship is what’s privileged – she a budding francophile with all the trimmings: she yearns for jazz, good food at restaurants (her father crumbles with anxiety about appetizers), art expositions & concerts–a free spirit devoid of prejudice. And yet the price she pays is to rigidly point her moral compass to the corrupt and go along for the ride. When Jenny is gossiping with friends at school, and she realizes that she will lose her virginity to David, she is taken aback but not surprised. And when David confronts her about the map, or his clients, his argument (to a 16 year old) is: well what did you

What makes this film work so well is that she is not an oppressed character, and its clear the memoir scribe (Lynn Barber) values this relationship as a key to her childhood (it “cured” her, she says), and so that colors the tenor of the narrative. Yes, David is creepy, beyond creepy, but he’s also charming and carefree (look at how carefully the moment when David reveals he, himself, has gone to Oxford is played, and Jenny’s reaction to this revelation – is she in on it, like she was in on Clive? Or is she as surprised as her parents?). But his creepiness never overtakes the film until he is fully revealed (and even then, the film may go too far to the left of Hollywood Blvd in castigating him), with the exception of one scene at Oxford after receiving the news that Jenny thinks it prudent to wait until she turns 17 (a very good idea, he concurs). And an early look in the film between David’s friends, which signals an understanding with the audience – yes, this relationship is weird to them – is later cast in a different, more confounding light.

The other side of her education is a little less engaging – Miss Stubbs, her teacher, is an honorable and likable woman whose life may not have turned out the way she wanted, but at least she has a firm understanding of her experience, which having mastered Heathcliff’s Otherness, she sorely lacks.

The ending of the film is unfortunate, but I guess pasted together in the way we come to expect these kinds of things – and the montage is a little surprising, but for all the churning music, couldn’t they have played some Chubby Checker?