Van Sant’s equally celebrated and ridiculed artsploitation renaissance, beginning with what was the first film in what his new film Last Days suggests is a tracking-shot trilogy, began suggesting narrative in purgatory. Continued by suspending not only narrative, but also character. Now winds up blocking not only character, but also the representative “what if” of his films’ simulacrummy mise en scène. Chronologically, the three films — Gerry and its displaced existentialists, Elephant and its Bressonian teen non-actors, and Last Days with a Boyz II Men video as its centerpiece — lie on a midterm bell curve, in which Van Sant’s seeming penance for saying “yessir” to Massuh Weinstein is inversely proportional to his desire to fearlessly stare down the synoptic requirements of his big-event subjects.
Elephant presented teenagers at the precise moment of modern life’s overwhelming crisis (the calcification of social roles), and Van Sant’s near audible lip-licking prurience over his “not a boy, not yet a woman” cast/class turned what could’ve easily been construed as the psychobabble of a closet pederast into a pubescent terrarium. Every lurching, inexorable tracking shot suggests the sense of overwhelming momentum of reaching the conclusion of pre-adult life, the discordance of irrepressible hormones and aspirations against an environment seemingly structured to compartmentalize and label individuals. Even attributable features one would presume belong to the drifters — i.e. the homosexuality of the two gunmen — show up in neatly organized, majority-rules sorts of situations like the P-FLAG coffee klatch. Which is undoubtedly the main reason that Van Sant made the on-the-surface dubious decision to give his own private Trenchcoat Mafiosi an interlude in which child psychologist watchdogs could undoubtedly tic checks off their list of warning signs: spitballs from thick-necked jocks, enthusiasm over Nazi propaganda, homosexuality stemming from isolation if not carnal attraction, violent video games.
It’s sort of an in-joke that the target practice game one of the two teen killers is shown playing is, in actuality, a recreation of the most elongated shot from Gerry, but it’s also a workable connective tissue. (Van Sant almost attempts a similar echo in Last Days when some of the scenesters are shown fleeing from rock star Blake’s mansion in their skuzzy box of a car, not unlike the first shot of Gerry.) The two lovers-not-lovers at the center of that desert standoff are a decade older, and the totality of their being lost is such that it can’t even be remedied by the most liberating environment imaginable, even as it strips away their debt to modernity, rationality, and sanity. To Elephant’s two killers, they are both more trapped and more sanctified. So they are the first to get shot.
Maybe I feel this only because I am decidedly not one of the many in my generation that count the day of Kurt Cobain’s suicide as a watershed moment in my life as a pop culture fluffer (can’t remember for the life of me where I was that day as can almost everyone else), but Last Days brings the careful artifice of Van Sant’s recent films to an unmistakably, somewhat disappointingly literal-minded “conclusion.” Pseudo-Cobain Blake’s isolationism and suicidal depression are effectively, gorgeously rendered (with more serpentine silkiness from Van Sant’s MVP DP Harris Savides and a fastidious attention to repetitious sounds and gestures). Michael Pitt’s half-heard mumbles (my favorite: when he drops the packet of Mac & Cheese powder into a pot of water, he retrieves it and wheezes “oh, my prize”) are the only tangible evidence that there’s something still rattling around in what is otherwise Van Sant’s ultimate pretty-boy shell. Even more ostensibly superfluous is everyone and everything around him. A box of Cocoa Krispies. Mormon twins. Asia Argento’s bobbling ass peeking out from under her billowy nightshirt. Coke bottle glasses-wearing Lukas Haas beseeching genius Blake’s input on a song he wants to dedicate to a Japanese chick (right before he shares a shirtless romp with another dude upstairs). Wait, what? Look, I was one of the few defenders of Elephant’s gay shower scene, and I know that Cobain sang “everyone is gay,” but a lot of this supposedly disposable “fringe” around Last Days that ought to read as pointless and digressive seems (if this can be said to be a fault) arousing to the point that it turns the film’s central figure from a misunderstood martyr into a big drag. When he finally removes himself from the world, it’s not a gesture rejecting the hollowness of his scene, but an example of the sort of denial rock stars wearing the blinders of their own legend must live (and die) in to keep it real.
Oh, wait. Maybe the anti-rockist in me likes this film more than I thought. I’ve got to allow that it takes a special perversity to film a Kurt Cobain anti-biopic in which the song viewers will most likely be have stuck in their heads afterwards is “On Bended Knee.” And for it to sound fantastically, fatalistically gorgeous.
Among the great films about suffering teens, valiant is the word for Carrie compared to Robert Bresson’s understated Mouchette. OK, it’s a shoddy pun, but the urge to do as the destitute, adolescent schoolgirl Mouchette does for her ill mom’s tightening trachea — namely crack a window to let some air in — is unavoidable. It is, after all, a film in which the central pariah cries more often in her sleep than she does during her meandering, hollow waking hours. Mouchette is wrenching, and Bresson’s unsentimental portrait of a sullen, entirely forgettable soul is as detached from pathos as it is plugged directly into the fabric of cinema logos. Far from an exercise in paring down to the bone, Bresson’s filmmaking style provides a heady variety of sensualisms that give us, the audience, an understanding of exactly what the title character is, for a number of reasons (i.e. poverty, hormones, misplaced self-esteem), unable to absorb. Which is why, when Mouchette finally and rather secretly (spoiler warning, et al) comes to decide that there is no benefit to continuing her own life, her abrupt suicide carries with it the extra sting of weighing the balance of Bresson’s careful mise-en-scene and judging it irrelevant, negligible, inadequate. Of what use are bumper cars, gin, carefully-layered foley bottle sound-effects, immaculately framed torsos, and the beauty of a parable well told in a bleak world that can’t even predict the impending suicide of a young girl? (Or, worse, consciously causes?) The demise of Balthazar (Mouchette’s maternal twin, nearly as ass-stubborn) is depicted with calm rationalism. Dredging up the au hazard of Job, Bresson refuses to endorse the donkey’s selflessness or even ascribe any sort of summational, sentimental thesis to the white-waves-of-sheep tableau. Replacing latent-theologic rationality with a mysticism (unto near-irreverence), the denouement of Mouchette is as disorienting as any film that would serve up, as a structural denouement, the main character’s suicide. One would be tempted to call the film Ophelia, Like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, is Dead weren’t Mouchette’s facsimile of Hamlet — a seizure-prone, drunk, poacher, and statutory rapist named Arsène — even less noble than the mud-slinging Mouchette. But Bresson’s devastating and trenchant point is that neither have to be noble to deserve more compassion than they’re ultimately given.
… in which nine female characters demonstrate their unique astrological connection to their menstrual cycles. Unlike the godawful mess that was Crash’s single trough urinal, the emphatically socially-conscious ensemble portmanteau Nine Lives is a neat row of immaculately kept stalls with an endless supply of free tampons — tampons infused with the essence of Sapphic resolve, the wisdom of social constructivism in the face of men’s addiction to “break stuff,” the bitter-sad irony of our collective narrative’s petite ironies, and… do I detect just a hint of patchouli oil? Does my flippancy put me in danger of being accused of bald-faced misogyny? Perhaps, and maybe more so if the film were actually written and directed by a woman (who would undoubtedly avoid saddling her enterprise with a title that evokes pussies) instead of benevolent harem leader Rodrigo García, but I pass the buck right along to the spate of largely positive reviews, the most condescending of which suggest that the only place where women “of an age” are likely to find the sort of roles “they deserve” are in “films like this,” which roughly translated means that old chicks deserve to spend the rest of their lives getting down on their liver-spotted knees and thanking Christ Jesus that there are still directors who never got over how much they wished Lily Tomlin in Nashville were their own mother. (Is William Fitchner’s poor, blue-balled ex-husband to a suitably nonplussed Amy Brenneman actually Tomlin’s deaf son, now all grown up and capable of misery masturbation?)
Funny Games, a tightly wound Teutonic exercise in sadism from Michael Haneke in which a sterilized, rich, single-child family finds their home invaded by two pranksters-cum-murderers who place a bet they won’t survive twelve hours, is like Lars Von Trier at his least controlled trying to fashion a Marxist grindhouse homage. And, no matter how many times Haneke winks at the camera through his deviant protagonists-by-proxy, it has no more to say about the audience’s relationship to the on-screen violence and emotional abuse than the two separate previews slapped together to sell Fight for Your Life: one of them stressing valiance (the one aimed at white audiences) and the other stressing salty-quipped retribution (the one aimed at black audiences, for whom that particular piece-of-shit film was helpfully re-titled I Hate Your Guts). In fact, at its deluded molten cortex, Funny Games (probably inadvertently) encourages the same brand of fascination with cheap social rifts (at the expense of its loftier aims of self-reflectivity, et al), only to pull the rug out from under the intelligentsia. It succeeds in inciting anger and forcing viewers to consider their own relationship to violence, but it makes the fatal error of assuming that audiences, like the central affluent family unit, are too privileged and comfortable to be either capable of or considerate enough to be initiated into a class dialogue without someone sticking a gun into their puckerhole. This is an obscene suggestion, and one which reveals a complete lack of faith in audiences of any stripe other than utter, nerve-fried nihilists, much less the sort of understandable, healthy bad faith to be found in something like Cannibal Holocaust or Dogville. Because Haneke’s bourgeoisie-crashing crusaders aren’t particularly intelligent, nor are their games particularly funny, any sort of social significance to their otherwise aimless brutality ends up getting sabotaged, skewing all concern against their representation of the supposed underclass’s rage (embodied, here, by the two assailants’ status as disaffected youths… not to mention, given all that queerish lip-pursing from the more dominant of the two, their latent hetero-cidal bent). Like the onslaught of cruel parlor games the family, particularly the wife, have to endure — “which would you rather lose, your son or your husband?” type stuff — Funny Games is frustrating, effective in its streamlined shock quotient and, in the end, adds little to your understanding of cinematic violence other than maybe the desire to return to the naiveté of cheap kicks rather than have to suffer through another half-baked dissertation.