movie notes.

Two films from SIFF stand out for me particularly, and it's no coincidence that they are both about childhood. The first is Hirokazu Koreeda's 'I Wish,' and the second is Wes Anderson's 'Moonrise Kingdom.' I understand now that I am particularly drawn to stories about childhood, about hopes and dreams and journeys, first loves and young sorrows, adventures and homecomings. Movies like 'Hope and Glory,' 'Au Revoir Les Enfants' and 'The 400 Blows' have stayed with me for most of my life, and what I look for now in a film is that same understanding of what it means to be young. There is an innocence and freedom and yet not a care-freeness. There is divorce and separation and being orphaned and being misunderstood by one's parents. There are wars and volcanoes and hurricanes. The gaze is a direct one, and it forces you to look inward.

Koreeda is perhaps a direct heir to Ozu's 'Good Morning,' with that same candidness of purpose in the two young brothers. Planning to bring their parents back together, running through their respective cities like the boys in Truffaut's '400 Blows,' ultimately coming to understand that even if their family is apart, there will always be that tie of brotherhood between them.


Anderson has of course his own visual language, verging on twee and yet for me not too overwhelming so. I have loved his work for a long time, and I will always remember what he said when he won an MTV Movie Award for 'Bottle Rocket.' He said something about how a bottle rocket was a little firecracker that didn't get very high off the ground, but it got as high as it was meant to go. His film named for that little firecracker did exactly that; it went as high as he intended it to go. There is always a sense of meticulous attention to every detail, every gesture, every word. Every film is like a perfectly timed firework that goes exactly where he wants it to go.

movie notes. the tree of life.

(contains spoilers).

I wasn't sure what to expect from Terrence Malick's latest film, The Tree of Life, but the trailer had been haunting me since I saw it, months ago. It won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, although generally this is not something that encourages me to see a film. It is even harder to describe the film, now that I've seen it. I don't quite know where to begin. There is that strange, flickering light that wavers onscreen; is it the origin of the universe? I have no idea.

Early in the film, a woman in a house filled with pristine mid-century modern furniture receives a telegram telling her that her son is dead. We watch her husband receive the news at an airfield, barely able to hear above the roar of the planes. We watch her grieve. We flash forward in time again to see another son, now a grown man, still with the weight of his brother's loss upon him. This man, played by Sean Penn, moves silently through his contemporary glass box of a house with its barely furnished rooms, his hair sleep-tousled into a bouffant crest like a startled cockatiel. He seems lost. What is he looking for? We see the earth form itself, waves breaking apart, land rising, dinosaurs in forests and along rivers. Wait. Dinosaurs?

But the heart of the movie, for me, is these three brothers in childhood. The time looks to be the early 1950's. There are two ways through life, says the mother, the way of nature, and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow. You feel that the mother has chosen one path, and the father another, and that their boys are forever pulled between the two. There is something menacing in the way the father treats them, and yet there is a kind of deep love there, in the way he looks at his sons, in the way he is forever cupping one hand around the neck of one of the boys, pulling them into an embrace. I keep thinking of a line by Kim Stafford in the prologue of Early Morning, describing a bike ride with his brother before dawn. Their father, the poet William Stafford, puts a hand on each of their shoulders before they set off on their bikes, heading down to the Pacific ocean. How long can you feel a hand, steady on your shoulder, after that hand pulls away?

This heart of the film, the three boys, is what I loved most. Their family is not like my family and my childhood was not that childhood, but there were things I remembered. What it felt like to run through tall grass, flinging myself down into the green coolness and rolling down a gentle slope. Swimming in a river or a lake or an outdoor pool under a hot sun. Being with my two cousins, when I visited them in Taiwan or later, when they came to live with us in Seattle. They were like my brothers, and some nights we would all fall into one bed together, our arms and legs tangling in sleep so that one would wake with someone else's foot in their face. The stinging nostalgia almost made me weep.

Stafford, Kim. Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford. Greywolf Press, 2002. p. ix.

certified copy. (movie notes).

*contains spoilers.*

I had heard of the director Abbas Kiarostami, but had never seen his films before. Certified Copy promised Juliette Binoche and the golden sunlit landscape of Tuscany, and since I love both of the above I knew I would see this one.

A man is giving a presentation of his new book. A woman arrives, late, with a preteen son in tow. The son is restless, bored, hungry, that dangerous combination every parent is familiar with, and they leave, after the woman hands a note to the man sitting next to her. Later, the man (the writer) finds her in a shop, and their story begins. They are strangers, or so it seems. They converse in English, with the polite words of people who are getting to know each other, as she drives through the countryside. They walk through the cobbled streets of an old town, look at art, drink coffee. Are they flirting with one another? Perhaps. And then the story takes a turn: they are not strangers at all. They are husband and wife.

Suddenly, the dialogue (now mostly in French) is not that of strangers, but of a couple who has been married for a while - fifteen years - and who are not together most of the time. It's never quite clear why they don't live together - part of their argument touches on an earlier car accident, which happened while she was driving home from one city to another, with their son in the car - but then it's not quite clear if this story is a continuation of the first one, or a new story. It's a little like being in a Calvino novel. I'm reminded of that Kieslowski film, The Double Life of Veronique, which splits into two halves as it traces the lives of the two Veroniques, only here you are even less sure of what's happening before you.

The woman, played by Juliette Binoche, isn't necessarily an admirable character. She is capricious, flirty, coy, then needy and almost desperate. But later there's a scene where she and her husband (played by the opera baritone William Shimell, who by the way is incredibly handsome) are arguing over dinner, and you see in her face this remarkable openness. There is something childlike about the way that Juliette Binoche looks into the camera, which has stayed with her throughout her entire career. Childlike is the wrong word, and so is innocent. Defenseless, perhaps. Yes, that's it - she has a way of putting down all her defenses, even when or especially when asking for something she cannot have. Her husband. His arms around her. Him walking beside her, always.

l'heure d'été. (movie notes).

*contains plot spoilers.*

I watched l'heure d'été (Summer Hours, directed by Olivier Assayas, 2008) some weeks ago, and it left me with a kind of lingering wistfulness. I think it's one of those films which will stay with me for a long time, from the opening sequence to the last moments. In between it is a meditation on the nature of art, of death, of family, of memory. Of childhood and growing old, opening on a pack of children running through the gardens of a family summer home, following a treasure map up and down trees and along steep winding paths. The house's chatelaine is turning 75. She is determined to see that her late uncle's legacy of art passes on after her death. She takes her unwilling oldest son through her things, the Majorelle desk and cabinet, the Redon panel that is quietly mouldering on the studio wall, the shards of a Degas plaster cast that her sons broke when they were boys. Everything has a memory for her, and she is the last one left.

If it were an American film, this elderly lady would die dramatically clutching her chest as a glass of water spills to the floor and shatters, as shocked family and devoted housekeeper looked on, but thankfully it is a French film, and her death happens offscreen. We move slowly through the seasons, as the three grieving grown-up children sift through the estate and come to terms with what it really means to preserve a legacy. The art goes to the Musée d'Orsay; the house is sold. Two of the grown children live abroad, and to them the house is just a house. "Our children won't care," one of the sons says. They won't remember the stories that come with every piece; for them the Uncle Paul who collected it all is just another ancestor who died before they were born.

Near the end of the movie, Frédéric and his wife walk through the Musée d'Orsay to see his family's collection displayed in the gallery of decorative arts. There is a piercing sense of nostalgia, seeing these antique pieces, the Majorelle desk cleared of papers and the vases arranged on glass shelves under spotlights, instead of on the mantelpiece or filled with summer flowers. The Redon panels have been cleaned and restored; behind the scenes an expert is piecing together the shattered Degas into a dancing girl. But there is also a sense of loss; that human touch of everyday life and its accompanying clutter has been swept away in the climate-controlled rooms of a museum. The line between art and object has blurred; that inlaid mahogany desk was built to be used, to be cherished, in a home. The painting was meant to be hung in defiance of rot. A vase is meant to be filled with flowers, no?

At the end, a teenage girl holds her boyfriend's hand as they walk across the countryside where she and her cousins played at the beginning of the film. She tells him, her grandmother used to bring her here, used to tell her that she in turn would bring her own children here. "Now the house belongs to someone else." But she'll remember it, always. Do you have a place like that in your heart? I do.