Viewing Log #3: Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009)

A second viewing of Yorgos Lanthimo's Dogtooth cleared up a few things which had confused me the first time through, but mostly my opinion remains unchanged. Also, getting to see Dogtooth digitally projected on the newly-released Kino Blu-ray allowed me to better appreciate Lanthimo's exquisite compositions, one of the highlights of the film. Dogtooth is the story of a family living in a large, secluded compound. The father, played by Christos Stergioglou, is the only one who leaves the house. He and his wife (Michelle Valley) have kept their three children (two daughters, played by Aggeliki Papoulia and Mary Tsoni, and a son, played by Christos Passalis) from being exposed to the outside world so as for them to remain pure, uncontaminated, clean. For the first half hour or so, Lanthimos and his cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis observe the routine of the household, a thoroughly fascinating spectacle which involves the three children listening to prerecorded lessons instructing them on the correct words by which to call certain objects (a twisted game which introduces the importance of language in Dogtooth's alternate universe), exercising in the garden and in the pool and engaging in competitions with one another in order to accumulate the most stickers. It all seems to work reasonably well, although from the beginning there are signs that the intricate system devised by the parents is not immune to dangers. First, the parents are forced to bring in a woman named Christina (Anna Kalaitzidou) to satisfy their son's sexual urges, and her interactions with the family start to set things askew. Also, the older daughter (Papoulia) is beginning to act out, first just verbally but eventually the infractions turn more severe. While I still have my doubts about how all of Dogtooth fits together, it's undeniable that the parts themselves are very beautiful (even if the content is, at times, quite ugly) and Lanthimos displays a cool intelligence throughout.

Viewing Log #2: Surviving Desire (Hal Hartley, 1991)

Having seen three of Hal Hartley's feature films (Trust, Simple Men, and Henry Fool) and an extraordinary short (Ambition) I'm convinced that he's one of the most original American filmmakers of the nineties. I've read that his more recent work is not quite at the level of his early output, but I look forward to watching some of those films (No Such Thing and The Girl from Monday in particular) sometime soon. Surviving Desire, a film Hartley made in 1991 which clocks in at under an hour, fits in nicely with his other works made around that time. It stars Martin Donovan as Jude, a college literature professor teaching Dostoevsky to a mostly apathetic class in which, however, is also seated Sofie (Mary B. Ward), a pretty girl with short hair who seems to actually care about the stuff he is babbling about. Jude endlessly goes over the same paragraph from The Brothers Karamazov ("It's an important paragraph," he says). Over the course of this tightly-constructed film, Jude and Sofie strike up a relationship which we only get to witness through small scenes like Jude going over to the bookstore where Sofie works. What most interests me about Hartley's films, something which is illustrated throughout Surviving Desire, is the role ideas play in his works. For all the intellectual wordplay to be found in the films of a Stillman or a Baumbach, their focus is always a narrative one, whereas for Hartley, in the subtly stylized world where his films take place, what matters are the ideas themselves, so that the characters, whose expression is almost always a blank one, are there solely to deliver the ideas and sometimes contrast them with other ideas. There's a great scene where Jude is talking to his friend, who works at the same bookstore as Sofie, precisely about the value of living in an imaginary world of books and ideas as opposed to the real world ("My biggest fear is this, that all my hard work, all my good intentions, all my studying, have been nothing more than the building of a wall between me and life," Jude says). It's a strange moment, and not an uncommon one in Hartley's films, one which seems to distance us completely from any sort of emotional involvement with these characters (just are the characters themselves are disconnected from their own lives, commenting on it rather than living it). But then usually something equally strange happens in a Hartley movie: you get adjusted to the rhythm of the film and its dialogues, the movement of the characters through these unimpressive environments and suddenly it all doesn't seem so abstract. You get an intimation of something sweet, sad, and, most importantly, thoroughly human beneath the surface.

Viewing Log #1: Everyone Else (Maren Ade, 2009)

Part of me wishes I hadn't started watching Maren Ade's Everyone Else with high expectations, a mistake I seem to be making often these days. The film, Ade's second (I have not yet seen The Forest for the Trees) is about a couple vacationing in the island of Sardinia. This is the kind of movie where you don't get a lot of information about the characters right away; instead, you're made to observe them at length and given the opportunity to pick up what you can from small gestures and offhand exchanges, something I typically admire in a film. The protagonists of Everyone Else are Chris (Lars Eidinger) and Gitti (Birgit Minichmayr). He's an architect and she works for a record company's public relations department. They're spending the summer in Chris' parents' house in Sardinia, where they hang out by the pool reading (or, more accurately, he reads while she applies makeup on him and makes strange noises), avoid running into their annoying neighbor (who is also an architect and will play an important role during the second half of the film) and go hiking in the mountains (the site of one of their fights and one of the best sequences in the film). By all appearances, then, they're a happy couple sharing a vacation in a truly beautiful environment. However, if you've read anything at all about the film, then you know its subject is not merely two characters positioned in the Mediterranean landscape (although, on some level, of course it is), but rather the slow and subtle unraveling of their relationship. If you know this going into the film, as I did, you can start looking for the clues quite early and will quickly understand Ade's ability to work these in naturally into the couple's everyday interactions. For example, there's a moment early on when, having applied lipstick and eye shadow on Chris, Gitti is questioned as to whether or not she considers her boyfriend to be masculine. It's a fairly unimportant remark made by Chris, but its echo will be felt later on when Gitti begins to have doubts about how Chris conducts himself in his business and, by extension, in his relationship with her. All in all, Everyone Else is clearly a fascinating film. After spending two hours with these characters I can't say that I was ever remotely bored, mostly due to the terrific and naturalistic performances delivered by Minichmayr and Eidinger as well as Ade's elegant visual style, which is uniformly lovely. However, by the end I don't think I had gone through anything like the intense emotional experience others seem to have found while watching the film, but I look forward to revisiting Everyone Else in the hopes that Ade's intentions will become clearer.