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.

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).

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 film is constructed of 50 short vignettes (some shorter than 30 seconds, others a bit longer). We see Swedish brass band enthusiasts practicing solo and aggravating their loved ones and neighbors, we see marriages new and old in varying states of desperation, old men alone (or with Norwegian Brunnehildes straddling them) despairing about their savings, doctor’s despairing about their patients (so desperate to get to his office for their appointment in the morning, they make the doctor take the stairs!).

The director, Roy Andresson, has been characterized by the Village Voice as a “slapstick Ingmar Bergman,” which is a similar approach to the Monty Python fusion, but lacks the even deeper understanding of our chronic existence that Andresson seems to have, which makes many scenes hilarious and heartrending, the best kind of funny where you can feel the knife being twisted into you. The skit-like approach to the material only makes it work better, because it’s never trying your patience. It’s just a routine for these people, every day at the bar going up at last call for a final drink before calling it a day, going to their doctor’s appointments, practicing their music, speaking to their children, attending bizarre, ritualistic functions where people stand on their chairs, and everyone’s having an excellent time, but – ah, alas! – your son calls you to ask for more money and you cannot participate.

All of the set pieces are at the same time so unique and yet so familiar and close to our own personal experiences. And speaking of the set pieces – every scene in this film was constructed on a set, and looks incredible, particularly when Andresson continues to move further into the background (such as with the tuba player in the beginning, when we see him through the married couple’s window practicing with the man ruining his light fixtures on the floor below). Much of the film’s true darkness lingers in the unsaid, such as the tablecloth scene. What is ‘revealed’ is left unacknowledged but left for all to see.

The other filmmaker that lurks in the background of Andresson is Luis Buñel, though Andresson’s lens is more focused on an individual’s place and purpose, rather than Buñel’s class-based sociopolitical works, like The Discreet Charm of the Bourgioisie, where it’s clear these are not so much characters as actions locked in perpetual motion. Really, do yourself a favor and check out this movie – just commit to watching the first 5 minutes via Netflix Streaming, and if you’ve gotten that far and aren’t totally smitten with it, then I think you should start it over and try again, you just might see yourself for a second.

*Though by the same token and to be fair, I thought the scene with the old guy and the viking helmet was unbearably pretentious. Back.

(Oh, and for fun – contrast the Swedes’ !sadness! in this movie with that of those in Where the Wild Things Are and tell me which seems more human. And don’t tell me they were monsters. I know they were monsters.)

So what are you left with in the movie? A glut of unappealing men talking about their unappealing perspective – which is fine, often the monologues are entertaining in a kind of gross way. But is there any way these interviews have any particular weight in the study of feminism as the movie suggests to reason this sociological study? Feminism? I guess, maybe, if you’re an undergrad at Sarah Lawrence College but wouldn’t a study of how men are affected by feminism negate the entire premise of feminism? Or has Women’s Studies reached the post meta post land, and thus this kind of thing would be an acceptable basis for an anthropological study (and excuse me, there’s methodology to an ethnographic study? Thank you Dr. Valentine) but it certainly wouldn’t be as unrealistic as the exchange between Timothy Hutton’s teacher and the girl which is just there to be some base justification for the whole ordeal that comes off as nothing more than a base justification and is kind of an insult to, like*, DFW’s writing.

The best monologue in the film is that of Subject #42, who recounts his father’s work as a Washroom attendant of which he’s simultaneously respectful and embarrassed about. It’s delivered with a raw intensity that really works, and maybe it’s because it isn’t at all hurried. I suspect it’s rather faithful to the book, but I honestly don’t remember it at all, and it’s one of the few monologues that’s representatively showcased (Christopher Meloni’s, on the other hand, is laughable in its winking, smirking, want-to-be-bad but is actually bad-ness) by actors and a set, which helps to fill in some of the void standing between the son and his father.
It raises some good rhetorical questions – Dominic Cooper’s monologue about rape is not at all believable or convincing, in part because it’s so loaded toward surprise and is absurdly confrontational. It’s an argument that gives you pause – it’s true, but given so much amplitude I think it loses a lot of its potential. If he were calm and collected and talking about perspective and knowing some thing, I would be more inclined to believe him than if he were hysterical and in my face screaming about how he’s in a better position because he’s been raped and knows what it’s like. That sounds more like post-traumatic stress disorder, which okay, is fine if that’s what we’re after here, but then why is the monologue so shift and loaded toward knocking the viewer on her ass.

And for fuck’s sake, can’t a one-armed stud play the one-armed stud? Do we honestly have to endure the embarrassment of watching that scene?

* This is another thing you’ll notice about his fiction that seems frequently absent from Wallace’s essays or non-fiction writing. Go back