Notes on Tati: Soigne ton gauche

by Willa Ross

It’s common consensus that Soigne ton gauche is the best of the three 30s shorts to star Jacques Tati, a consensus with which I’m inclined to agree. And while it gives strong indications that Tati was growing as a writer and a screen performer, an equally critical factor in its success is René Clément, one of his only comedies and earliest efforts as director here but a competent and accomplished work nonetheless. Clément favours a rapid, highly dynamic pace through highly varied and dynamic camera angles, energetic camera movements, occasional undercranking, and rapid edits. This last point — at once the most accomplished stylistic trait of the film and perhaps its most misguided — makes itself clear as soon as the short opens: a postman cycles along the country paths and roads of rural France, zipping around corners, signaling though there’s not a soul in sight, and finally stopping in the village by simply tumbling forward off his still-moving bike. That stunt itself uses a jump cut just before the fall; it’s a rare instance in a Tati-starring film of an edit that allows a physical performance to cheat, but it works anyway, largely because the quick pace of the cuts already feels stylistically in line with the film and serves the slightly panicky, physically chaotic entrance. “Must be the postman!” exclaims a man who hears the crash but does not see it, and the postman delivers a letter to a group of men reclining by a boxing ring.

This sets up a plot similar to On demande un brute. One of the men is a star boxer, the rest help him to train, and the letter is insisting that they continue to train, as there’s a big crowd booked for their next match. They set out to training, but he’s a little too good: he knocks out his sparring partners straightaway. His manager quickly finds him a local farmhand named Roger — our Tati — who agrees, though he’s never boxed a day in his life.

This is drastically different from the tense setups of On demande un brute and Gai dimanche!, both of which involved characters forced into their actions by financial stress. Roger enters the bout willingly and knowingly. But why? Like those past films (and his future ones!), Tati plays a man unafraid to play, to imagine, to pretend. We first meet him playing with local children pretending to be a famous track star and they play the media, performing mock news reports and even pretending to film with a handmade toy camera, complete with a crank. Roger’s post-victory is cut short when he is called to work moving bales of hay near the boxing ring, where he quickly gets bored and mimes at boxing himself when he’s spotted and asked to spar. So here we have a dreamer, someone who wants to see what it means to live as other people do, and who gets his chance. He accepts not in spite of the physical danger and reality, but because of it.

But reality and imagination prove at odds with each other. As he fights, Roger looks through a little booklet of boxing advice in the ring, and every time he adopts a technique, he takes a punch, turns around, and looks through for more techniques. It’s a gag repeated again and again — with only slight variation — and while it gradually wears thin (save a lovely twist where Roger mistakes a back cover advertisement for a fencing booklet for advice on a boxing stance), it’s given more attention than any other gag in the movie, and so must have been especially attractive to Tati. Perhaps it’s because every variation is a chance for a new pose, a new bit of physical comedy for the performer whose miming act “Sporting Impressions” was in the process of making him a music-hall star across Europe. But it may also have been a moment of recognition for Tati of one of his pet themes, that of the outsider trying to understand the proper way to emulate a social behaviour and inevitably failing and watching chaos ensue around him.

And so chaos does, for after the pro boxer unknowingly connects one of his punches to the postman, the latter stomps off to find people to help him retaliate, and finds two tough-looking farmers who don’t take kindly to people who attack helpless postmen. Soon five men are in a fistfight on the ring, whose cheap structure gives way and leaves them finishing the fight in a broken down shambles of a wooden frame.

While the cutting is at times a little too brisk for the leisurely pace of the plot and the truly graceful acting that Tati delivers, the short is well-crafted and offers a coherent artistic vision. Tati-esque touches abound in general. We may easily mistake the overeager postman for Francoise, the subject of Tati’s L'École des facteurs and Jour de fête; likewise, Roger resembles a slightly more sullen Hulot, curious, befuddled, and entirely good-natured. Unlike the earlier shorts, both of which used faster pace musical scores to create a frantic soundscape, Jean Yatove’s for Soigne is mostly more relaxed. Rather than a driving underscore, the soundtrack’s jovial, fair-like atmosphere is more in line with Tati’s eventual musical modus operandi, even if it seems likely Tati had no direct hand in influencing it. Consistent with that convivial tone, there is no villain here: Roger’s opponent is patient, indulgent, friendly even, and the brawl that destroys the ring is instigated by an accident. And like the Royal Garden restaurant in Playtime, when it collapses, it becomes an entirely new structure that is now better suited to Tati’s character than those around him, and he quickly claims a KO and a decisive victory. While the satirical import and mind boggling complexity of that late masterwork certainly aren’t present here, one can leave Soigne ton gauche with a far better-formed impression of the artist than Une brute or Gai dimanche!. The final image, more than any one moment before it, bears Tati’s unmistakable signature in its wistful ode to the imagination: a wide shot of the kid with the toy camera as he rushes to film the postman cycling away down a long road.

Other Essays in This Series

On demande une brute
Gai dimanche
Soigne ton gauche

On the unknown self in "Asako I & II" (2018)

by Willa Ross

This piece references plot details indiscriminately.

In romance stories every happy ending is the same, and every tragic finale is different. If there is a space between, it’s maddeningly difficult to define in anything but contradictory terms: if love does not end happily, how can it avoid some trace of tragedy? But how many of our own personal stories of romances cannot be cleanly sifted into one box or another, but are instead held in our memory in a slow, wobbling uncertainty, for months or years or decades before we can finally pack them away and assume they’ll never come open again? And who doesn’t on some level fear the re-emergence of some past romantic episode? More than anything, Asako I & II, is about these fears, a treatment of their simmering, unacknowledged presence in our lives that ends with a terrifying affirmation of a notion famously expressed by Faulkner: "The past isn't dead; it isn't even past."

A romance film in the arthouse tradition, that is, one about obsession and doubles and finally an acceptance of one’s own long-denied perversity, Asako I & II may resemble familiar works in some ways, but it is, at long last, too tragic not to stand alone. After a few months of a reckless, love-at-first-sight relationship, the stone-faced, beautiful, and dangerously carefree Baku goes out to buy shoes and never returns to his lover, the meek and distantly sweet Asako. Years later, she meets Baku’s doppelganger, Ryohei, and soon falls into a long and loving relationship with him without ever mentioning his uncanny resemblance to her former lover. As the years pass by, the two clearly forge a more complex and communicative bond with each other than what Asako ever had with Baku; the outgoing, emotional, cautious and slightly needy Ryohei is pointedly sketched as Baku’s inverse. Then tremors of uncertainty emerge when Baku is suddenly reintroduced into the outskirts of her life: he’s become a celebrity through a career in modeling and acting. Asako can no longer ignore him.

That description forms the vast majority of plot, but the events are not linked through any traditional cause-and-effect construction. Explanations for characters’ decisions or outcomes cannot be decisively proven, only plurally hypothesized. Ultimately, we judge these people because we cannot understand them. We are called on to observe them with empathy, but Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s direction and his co-written script studiously avoid tidy conclusions. This is a script dedicated to suggestion and possibility, and so its tone is rife with uncertainty and melancholy.

The aim is not to psychologize characters by slowly unveiling the full breadth and depth of their inner lives. Such an approach would in fact be antithetical to its core thesis. Instead, it advances a disturbing implication that a person who is ignorant of their own thoughts and desires is not necessarily ignorant, but that in the absence of certainty they have to work off a best guess. That is, the choice is to live forever with the destabilizing forces of trauma and loss, or to choose to tell one’s self a story that offers the best hope for moving forward, with “truth” as a faint and ephemeral Macguffin. Point of view shots, the most direct evocation of subjectivity and selfhood here, do not clarify feelings and identities; instead they render the thoughts behind their gazes disjunctive and ambiguous. One scene has a group of strangers insisting that Asako — whose perspective the frame assumes for a moment — eat an oyster for the first time. When she tries it, she quickly puts her hand to her mouth, seemingly revolted or even sick, and after a long moment she pulls her hand away, smiles, and says “It’s good!” Is she merely saving face? Is she lying to herself and them? Whatever the answer is, stepping into her shoes via the camera brings us no closer to it.

Above all else, Asako I & II is about the impossibility of yoking Identity to experience, and the scenario tests this premise in different variations and combinations. Most obviously there are the doppelgangers and the divided inner self of Asako herself (the English title probably doesn't go far enough in merely suggesting duality). But other echoes, reflections, and imperfect impressions of characters' interiority make this not merely an intellectual exercise but a mysterious experience. Asako's close friend Maya, an actor at the outset of her career when we first see her, is particularly memorable as a character who doesn't merely yearn to be with someone else, but to be someone else; most obviously she wants to perform as other people on stage and television. But it’s strongly hinted that she is also in love with Ryohei, and rather than competing for him she contents herself by vicariously enjoying his unflagging adoration for Asako.

The film is at once committed to suggesting psychological spaces by elliding them, and to maintaining a focus on interiority at all cost. Even acts of nature are blatantly symbolic: the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake is almost entirely severed from its sociopolitical consequences or even much of a procedural look at how people on the ground reacted to it. Instead, like the fireworks that explode in the moment she first locks eyes with Baku, it signals a violent rupture more for an individual than a wider population, and marks an uncanny shift in Asako’s attitude and choices. Whether this is meant to portray a world whose whims of chance and coincidence determine people’s lives, an outward expression of inward states, or both, is left somewhat frustratingly unclear, not to mention confusingly inconsistent: the most perilous moment for Asako, a motorcycle crash that occurs offscreen moments before we see her and Baku splayed across the pavement unharmed, arrives with no corresponding moment of inward change, and is simply used to illustrate her naive willingness to put her life — emotionally and physically — in the hands of someone who seems bound to destroy it. Like the earthquake, it’s a powerful moment taken on its own. But it’s also part of a wider approach to symbolism which (far more than its unwillingness to explain or diagnose its characters) sometimes renders Asako’s storytelling too diffuse for its own good.

Water is the most frequently summoned of these symbols, in rain, rivers, kitchen sinks, and elsewhere. It recurs so often that its significance demands attention (in the full sense of “demands”). Characters expose themselves to it, shield themselves and others from it, yearn for what (or who) is in the rain, settle for a life safely sheltered from it. When Asako and Ryohei move back to Osaka, where the obsession with Baku began and — for a few years — seemed to be buried, the impending disaster is underscored by a river next to their new home that runs so high a flood seems inevitable.

And it is. When Baku returns, it's so sudden and brazen that the gentle rhythm of life Asako has built with Ryohei and her friends is ruptured with a hallucinatory suddenness. The results are an apocalyptic realization of everyone's worst fears: Asako runs off with Baku, tells Maya (devastated more than anything by Ryohei's despondence) that she will never come back, and throws her cell phone out the window of Baku's car. He seems to feel neither here nor there about it. They seem to be driving into nowhere. Asako balks at the emptiness of her lover and her future; she goes back to Osaka and begs Ryohei to forgive and trust her. He eventually offers the former, but forever precludes the latter.

These final scenes are the film's only serious misstep, ending on a belaboured attempt at ambiguity and an on-the-nose recitation of water's symbolic significance (with Ryohei disgusted by a river's underlying uncleanliness, and Asako entranced by its aesthetic beauty). In truth, the trajectory of these people is too far down past too many points of no return to imagine their relationship as anything but an unhealthy one, and the attempt to tease out hopes to the contrary offer little to persuade otherwise. With the over-elaborated plotting and symbolism of the last 15 minutes, Asako I & II writes itself into a corner, but it's a corner that never really needed to be there in the first place. Just before this epilogue comes a moment that renders all that follows redundant with its totalizing immensity: Asako and Baku stop the car on a long, faceless stretch of highway, effectively walled in by concrete embankments shielding it against the sea. "You can't even hear the waves," Baku remarks, and it's true; this is the one moment when the sound design's ambience becomes uncanny, when we cannot resolve our intellectual understanding of the space with our visceral reception of it. In this moment Asako sends Baku on without her, and after he drives away, she climbs the embankment to face the vast water. Once more, a POV shot filled with the merged grayness of sky and water raises more uncertainty than clarity, but now the oceanic confusion is at last confronted head-on. Everything that follows over-enunciates what we learn in this moment: there are no easy answers as to where that confrontation leads, or the right way to handle it. Avoiding it may be the most monstrous choice of all.

Notes on Tati: Gai dimanche (1935)

by Willa Ross

In Jacques Tati: His Life and Art (Panther), David Bellos mentions an anecdote in which Tati would claim the early shorts he wrote and performed in were funded entirely through his work in music-hall performances. As Tati told it, he would save some money, buy a few meters of unexposed film, and repeat the process. Bellos points out that his early shorts were either too expensive to entirely jibe with this shoestring funding story or made before he had any music-hall income to speak of. Given that these early shorts were such collaborative efforts (with directors, co-writers, producers, etc. working in what seems to have been a horizontal production structure), perhaps they represented a pooling of resources that had each party dredging up cash in their own ways, and one of Tati’s tasks was to purchase the footage. Whatever the truth of the matter, the anecdote stresses that these shorts were not cynical or merely desperate attempts to escape the challenge of making a living as a live performer in depression-era France; by all appearances they seem to have been labours of love.

While On demande une brute is by any standard a thoroughly clumsy work that neither conforms clearly to Tati’s pre-filmic mime act nor the tastes and interests he would come to display as the world’s pre-eminent master of cinematic high comedy, Gai dimanche is both an unmistakably formative work and a far greater success. The short centers on two homeless grifters who one day decide they’d like a day in the country, and set about to realize it by stealing a rickety 10-seater charabanc and charging tourists for a leisure tour, complete with meal and entertainment. The setup foregrounds the modus operandi that came to define Tati’s approach: breakdowns of human behaviour across class that show up the absurdity of social programming and how it pervades spaces of work and of leisure.

In an early scene, as the pair of con men search a car lot for a workable ride, one nearby jalopy seems to start up all its own; when they open the lid, they find a kid in the empty compartment, blowing against his lips and making believe that he’s an engine as he holds a steering wheel in front of him. They wordlessly close the lid and leave him alone. While the gag isn’t especially complex or surprising, its use of sound without a clear originating source — what Michel Chion called “acousmatic sound” — foreshadows Tati’s obsessive play with the source, perspective, and audience assumptions attached to sounds in his films, and the way that our expectations of sounds play into our instilled sense of proper behaviour. The reaction is equally telling: as we’ll see time and time again in his Hulot films, the typical reaction of onlookers to an outsider’s well-meaning transgressions is to ignore it. That reaction is often more absurd than anything done by the unwitting interloper, and it’s there that Tati finds the core of his humour, both in its famously gentle observation of foibles and its acclaimed satiric intelligence.

That gag, while formally interesting, is nonetheless slight; mildly clever but lacking in elaboration or depth. Much the same can be said for the rest of Gai Dimanche, whose best gags either have a ring of familiarity from silent comedies by Sennett, Chaplin, Keaton, and others, or from their development into far superior forms in Tati’s features. Indeed, while his personality is on clearer display, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Tati is less impressive than his co-star and co-writer (and close friend), Rhum. The scarce dialogue given to Tati is delivered with a positively leaden lack of energy, and while his physical performance once again shows the clear skills of a uniquely talented mime (particularly in a sequence where the two con artists make a spirited attempt to attract customers to their tour, then gradually deflate into dejection when nobody shows interest), Rhum is his near equal that regard, and his skill with rat-a-tat verbal delivery make him the de facto star of the short.

After the disastrous excursion plays out in scenarios both funny (a passenger’s legs breaking through his seat, forcing him to jog along the pavement as the charabanc drives on) and unfunny (a large woman has trouble getting up into her seat), the final gag shows Gai dimanche’s most Tati-esque side as well as its still-unformed comic voice: after a train obliterates the charabanc, the drivers and passengers walk back to the city on the road in the exact same formation as before, with Rhum pointing to the side and guiding the sightseeing tour as Tati grasps the detached steering wheel in front of him. It’s an amusing-enough articulation of people’s desire for routine and normalcy, and the paradoxically absurd results of that attitude. At the same time, the complete lack of indignation from even the most well-to-do of Tati’s and Rhum’s customers feels unconvincing. Tati would eventually recognize the resistance people tend to have to paradigm-shattering playfulness and endow it with a sense of pathos that elevated his Hulot comedies from amusements to masterpieces, but the partial gestation of his worldview visible here — especially when assisted by competent direction and far more involved sound design — makes for a fun Sunday viewing.

Other Essays in This Series

On demande une brute
Gai dimanche
Soigne ton gauche

A Monument to Death: The mad melancholy of Ed Wood's "Bride of the Monster" (1955)

by Willa Ross

Following Glen or Glenda and Jail Bait, Ed Wood somehow managed to get his hands on a budget more than triple that of his first two films, and used it to make his most overtly melancholic picture, a riff on the Universal Frankenstein films that starred Boris Karloff. As the second (and most substantial) collaboration between Wood and Bela Lugosi, this film gives the old horror star a role as Dr. Eric Vornoff, a long-banished scientific genius of some European power, who has committed himself to using atomic energy to create superhuman soldiers and revenge himself upon a world that jeered him and took his home away.

This is the first and most expensive film in Wood's legendary Kelton Trilogy, and in many ways it shows: sets frequently resemble the locations they aim to represent, camera movements are fairly regular occurrences, and the lighting is more elaborate and attractive than anything seen in Plan 9 from Outer Space or Night of the Ghouls. What's more, while the film's construction is shabby by any typical Hollywood standard of craft, this provides more genuine technical showmanship than any other Wood movie I've seen, with ambitious and well-motivated movements, expressive blocking, and a daring willingness to slow the pace down — and yes, it’s on purpose.

It is also, by far, the most melancholic Ed Wood movie I've seen — and the Kelton Trilogy does not lack for melancholy. Vornoff is, unequivocally, a villain — delighting in siccing his giant octopus(!) on people, beating his mute, mentally disabled assistant Lobo (who is heavily implied to be the result of a failed experiment), and lamenting the death of his home and the ruin of his name. Twice he ruminates that his name is little-recognized; the erasure of his existence and his gift weigh heavily on him. Meanwhile, a very low-stakes feeling main plot draws a newspaper reporter and her police lieutenant fiance into their own respective investigations of Vornoff and the rumours of a giant monster killing people in the swamp.

All this is peppered with just enough Wood-ian moments to make it an enjoyable viewing experience; sometimes those moments are risible, and sometimes reaches for and achieves a true poetry, as in one scene where two police officers reflect on the swamp that serves as the center of the story, and as they speak Wood cuts to a lengthy lateral tracking shot that slinks across a river as the trees on the far shore slide past. "This swamp is a monument to death," Craig says, and for a moment a true sense of mortal anxiety palpably emerges.

It all seems to be a slightly battier progression from Jail Bait's mostly-conventional plotting and presentation, and therefore primed for placement among Wood's minor work. Then Lobo knocks out Vornoff, places him on his own operating table, and the film goes absolutely nuts, escalating until its explosively discordant ending.

There are more than a few resemblances between this film and Kiss Me Deadly, a film released only a week after this one, which similarly deconstructed and criticized its genre before an ending that explodes the film's structure itself with a nuclear flash. Bride takes this atomic explosion even further — both in terms of its rapid narrative deterioration and by the depiction of an actual nuclear test footage when Vornoff and the octopus are inexplicably destroyed by lightning. The doctor is, at last, disintegrated, not only his name but every atom of his body cast into the fire.

In this sense, the film is Wood's most direct and successful allegory for the threat of nuclear weapons, a threat that churns reason into madness and whose logical endpoint is illogical destruction. Plan 9, of course, would deal with similar themes, but takes inter-cultural paranoia as more of an interest than nuclear devastation. It may not have the scene-for-scene bombast of Wood's other great works, but it trades that for his only honest-to-god big-picture structural setup and payoff, one that renders the ending all the more astonishing and confusing and entertaining by its relative meekness in advance. That makes it a perfect introduction to Ed Wood, whose internal sense of poetry will not be shackled by the strictures of conventional "quality" filmmaking.

"He tampered in God's domain," intones the old police chief as he and the film's other stars watch the mushroom cloud. As a caution against overreaching science, it's not especially convincing — after all, this guy had no way of even knowing about Vornoff's experiments. But take the other possible meaning of that phrase, and it becomes apropos, even poignant. Wood, an avowed cross-dresser and artist who was punished again and again just for who he was, must have felt acutely for the man who was destroyed for having a unique mind. It wasn't for challenging the rights of God to create life that Vornoff was shunned and finally annihilated; it was trying to rise above the circumstances of his fortune-blighted existence that earned him his cosmic judgment.

Notes on Tati: On demande un brute (1934)

by Willa Ross

As the oldest surviving film to feature Jacques Tati, this provides an interesting ground zero for his talents, even if it's a pretty lousy cast-off of a comedy. Here, Tati co-wrote with Alfred Sauvy this short about a young, lanky actor named Roustabat, who has trouble getting cast, and whose domestic partner is constantly insulting him and his vocation. Meanwhile, a low-level fight organizer is having trouble booking an opponent for a wrestling match he's already sold out (nobody wants to fight his infamously brutish star fighter), and so he publishes in the newspaper a vague call for men "specializing in violent roles". You can probably fill in most of the blanks from there.

This makes direct show of Tati’s love of silent comedy — most obviously, in the fight sequence, Chaplin and his City Lights — but unlike his features that evolved a more open-ended structure to scenes, each vignette here takes on a clear comic premise by way of a sitcom-y point of tension. The use of sound is also not especially crucial to anything in the movie. In fact with the dialogue removed and a few intertitles added, On demande une brute would work as a silent. In some ways, it might even be better off in such a form: the music, a first-time score by Marcel Landowski, frequently competes with the dialogue, and heavily punches up most of the slapstick gags, leaving hardly any work to be done by sound effects.

On the other hand, one of the most effective moments of the film comes when  short, pathetic little crunch as the scene fades out. It’s a very Tati-esque use of sound by the director Charles Barrois, and one wishes he displayed the same light touch and attention to the most effective points of comic focus throughout the film. Sadly, he often drops the ball in this respect; not only are many of the cuts to reverse shots and close ups awkward and disorienting, but Barrois will frequently miss major opportunities for laughs. For example, just before the fight, as the announcer is still addressing the audience, someone accidentally hits the gong, and Roustabat’s opponent mindlessly charges the poor man in the middle of the ring, leading to a moment of chaos where several men have to pull it off. It’s a perfect moment to indulge in a closeup of Tati’s worried face as the punchline, but that fairly clear chance for a payoff never comes. Not that Barrois’s work has nothing to recommend it. Now and then a shot or series of cuts will show an interesting sense of staging or strangeness (as when Roustabat is hung upside down near the end of the ring and sees a face next to his ringside, and a series of cuts flip quickly between his POV and a right-side-up view of the man). But in the main it’s a visually disinterested, burdensome comedy, both stylistically anonymous and quite poor at emphasizing comedy.

I don’t want to give the impression here that Barrois fails because he fails to highlight Tati’s great performing ability, since Tati’s performance itself here is, shockingly, kind of lousy. While he shows some of the precise control over his body that would make him one of the most graceful physical actors there ever was, his sense of how to exploit little changes to the angles of his limbs, affect an entire personality in his gait or lean or cock of the head, or use tiny changes of facial expression to worldlessly communicate a universe of inner thoughts... well, that sense simply isn’t visible here. Instead, it’s a performance with a fairly game willingness to emphasize Tati’s stick-like figure and a lot — a shocking amount, really! — of mugging.

After Roustabat upsets the fight and wins (by cheating), he, his friend Mérandol (who smashed the other fighter’s head with a lead pipe), and his now-admiring wife head to a car outside. After the three disappear behind the vehicle, it drives off and leaves his formerly-nagging wife behind. It’s a surprisingly mean-spirited ending for the future auteur whose own films would only gently mock the vices and pretensions of others. It may be one of the best-staged gags in the movie, but that ought to lend you a sense of how low the bar is set here. It’s a mostly good-natured and well-intentioned film (short of the caustic depiction of its only female character and a scene that makes rather cruel use of a live fish). That it was made by a combination of upstart professionals and rank amateurs to film (the latter category including Tati himself) accounts for its issues, though when viewed an early attempt for the destitute-at-the-time Tati to break from the music-hall into motion pictures, there are hints of his future output’s ethos, in particular a sympathy for the dim, hapless, and incurably uncivilized but thoroughly well-meaning outsider.

Other Essays in This Series

On demande une brute
Gai dimanche
Soigne ton gauche

Notes on John Wick: Chapter 3 (2019)

by Willa Ross

Sure, you can make the case that the John Wick movies — his entire filmography to date — aren’t ideal uses of Chad Stahelski’s talent, but as far as the setup and execution of car chases, gunfights, knife fights, and kung fu battles, I don’t think there’s many ways to fault him for lacking competence or creativity. The particular brand of pop cinema that Stahelski and his team pull off here is something that you can’t find anywhere else, and in a way that makes John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum one of the best modern action movies of its kind. That it is still a decidedly flawed movie may speak to the lack of great work being done in that sphere by Hollywood filmmakers, but it also shouldn’t deter appreciation by what it gets right, and what it gets so, so right is its ability to economically introduce interesting fight scenarios and then capitalize on them with panache.

The plot reconfigures the rules and stakes from the last chapter, but still feels very much of a formula: Reeves is back as John Wick, the former assassin who took revenge on a low-level mobster for killing the puppy his wife had delivered to him just after her death, setting off a chain of resentment and attempts of payback all the way up to the “High Table”, a council of the most powerful criminals in the world who have a text message to every criminal in the world that they should kill John Wick, or at the very least not help him. Enforcing the will of that council is the “Adjudicator”, a brusquely direct emissary who informs those who have displeased the high table (usually by helping John Wick) that they have to accept punishment in the form of a bunch of scarring sword slices or having their hands stabbed or being fired. I’m not sure why she doesn’t just have them killed, which crime bosses tend to do to avoid having maimed or humiliated underlings turn against them, but I’m not gonna raise too much of a stink about a premise that is openly ridiculous in the first place. I wish the plot of these movies made more sense, but it rarely gets in the way of the action.

That’s similarly the biggest compliment you can pay to the music, which, to be 100% clear, is me damning it with faint praise. While Tyler Bates and Joel J. Richard once again avoid the overwhelmingly generic rock beats ‘n’ guitar chords of the first film by using a broader palette of electronic rhythms and ambiences, the music remains frustratingly limited in its development and tonal flexibility. The main theme in particular has received virtually no meaningful embellishment over the course of three movies now, which particularly stings given it was never a complex or especially expressive theme to begin with. One could argue that John Wick himself isn’t the most dynamic character, but that’s no excuse for this kind of musical inertia. It certainly doesn’t stop the film’s other craftspeople from trying new things elsewhere.

(A sidebar on a particularly annoying aspect of the score: The single most interesting musical decision in the film is the use of the first Winter movement from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Unlike the second film’s Vivaldi cue, which used a heavily electronic remix of the third Summer movement, the use of Winter I here is a straightforward orchestral performance of the original composition, which works terrifically well to create a chilled sense of foreboding. Confusingly though, rather than changing to an action-movie styled take on the movement or using the fast-paced third Winter movement, once the fighting starts the soundtrack reprises that same damn Summer electronic piece from Chapter 2, a nonsensical choice that once again foregrounds what an ineffective redo it was. Given that the credits feature a similar remix of Winter I, it seems like a safe assumption that Stahelski was unsatisfied with the new cue, opted to reuse the old piece, and stuck Bates’s and Richard’s take on “Winter” in the credits. I can’t entirely blame him, since the piece heard in the credits once again scuttles the rhythmic glories of Vivaldi’s piece and uses a dull electronic arrangement, but undercutting the continuity of the musical concept by using the reprise was at least as bad a choice, especially when it meant reusing a cue that wasn’t good to begin with.)

Just as Bates and Richards earn the same criticisms, every positive thing I said about Dan Laustsen’s cinematography in the last one applies here (though sadly this time Kevin Kavanaugh’s production design finds less opportunities for those ornate parodies of locations). Laustsen’s work in this series is a highlight of the 2010s’ neon revival, tremendously baroque with its placement of coloured lights and shadows and thoughtful in its scope framing, assisted by Stahelski’s marvelous gift for camera direction, which is more consistent here than ever, both in the loud and quiet parts. That goes for the loud parts especially though; the clearness of the staging belies the complexity and precision of the camerawork here. In particular, one sequence involving two gunfighters fighting alongside two dogs makes incredible use of the camera to establish the lateral space and track how quickly and efficiently the dogs can close that distance while keeping everyone’s position’s clear in any given moment. A John Wick movie could work with a lot of parts or personnel shuffled around, but it’s hard to imagine one this good without Stahelski and Laustsen behind it.

While John Wick mostly confined itself to superlative displays of driving and gun fu from Reeves and Chapter 2 added interest by setting up his limitations and making more extensive use of the fight settings, Chapter 3 blows elevates the series to new levels of complexity and invention. There are multiple action sequences in Parabellum that take unusual premises (fighting in a stable full of horses, fighting in a room full of antique bladed weapons behind glass, fighting goons who are so heavily armoured that the only way to actually kill them is by walking up, opening their helmets’ visors, and shooting into them) and explore every logical avenue imaginable and, most delightfully, many I didn’t imagine at all. One of the most relieving things about this is just how funny the action is, how almost every fight indulges over and over in those Buster Keaton-esque setups and payoffs, those logical extremes that shock you, but at the same time make complete sense for the characters and their situation. While the last two or three fight scenes lack this sense of humour on account of being standard melee combat, they are at least excellent melee combat, if a bit of an anti-climax (made all the more familiar by an obvious nod to the structure of Game of Death). The only real complaint I have is that the sound design, while mostly terrific, is a little overeager to make every impact a thooming, bone-crushing smash, which makes it hard to distinguish the big hits from the really big hits. You can’t go up from 10, as they say.

One way that Parabellum achieves such diverse action scenarios is by leaning harder into an episodic story structure than either of the Wicks before it. On one hand, this means that dramatic development is extremely minimal, as characters tend to show up, have their personal conflicts introduced, and then either be killed outright or be shown the door for potential reuse in a sequel. By traditional standards of feature film storytelling, this is a problem; here, though, quickly sketched, entertaining characters are entirely suited to economically setting up the conditions and stakes of the next big rumble. I don’t think I’d go so far as saying it’s a good script — the writing is mostly boilerplate as usual, the rules of the universe are still a bit arbitrary and inconsistent, and the material is primarily elevated by the cast’s more over-the-top performances and Stahelski’s direction — but Derek Kolstad has sanded off a lot of the issues that his scripts caused for the first two movies. This time around his most unforgivable sin is having Keanu Reeves deliver a weightless nostlagia-boom for fans of The Matrix by having him say, “Guns, lots of guns”. I mean come on, man. We’re all aware he was Neo.

After three movies of insanely brutal carnage, though, it probably behooves one to, uh, think about violence for a second. What, after all this, almost six hours of headshots and flipping people over and smashing vehicles, does it all mean? The easy (and filmmaker-intended) answer is “not a thing, it’s a cartoon, enjoy it,” but that feels a little too pat. I’ve seen reactions to John Wick: Chapter 3 that chastise it for indulging so gleefully in gun violence, but that feels too exclusionary towards the self-aware cartoonishness that the series has cultivated and improved from one entry to the next (and I do not have the patience to return to a debate about whether violent cartoons are “moral”). Maybe what squash and stretch physics do for the emphatic motion and chaos of Bugs Bunny, brain matter and broken bones do for the John Wick movies; mutual exaggerations of the physical effects of violence. Maybe laughing at most of a head disappearing under a shotgun blast is different than laughing at Wile E. Coyote turning into an accordion. Maybe one is more honest, maybe one desensitizes you less. Maybe it’s okay to have fun in a movie where horrible people who are caricatures of organized criminals in an absurdly implausible global gang hierarchy murder each other in creative ways. Yeah, that last one feels good. Let’s go with that.

Other Essays in This Series

John Wick
John Wick: Chapter 2
John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum

Notes on John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017)

By Willa Ross

If this was 2014 and I was allowed to offer one piece of advice to the makers of John Wick for their development of a sequel, it would be to adopt a greater commitment to tone. While that film played with some goofier material and sprinkled in some personal pathos and indulged in some heightened crime drama, its expression of each tended to feel like half-measures, rubber banded to an indistinct center whose emotional heft was murkier than the film’s needlessly low-contrast photography. The crime material offered up hammy line readings but ought to have pushed the juvenilia of its world-building up to the hilt, the mourning and reflection was given time to but rarely aimed for the melodramatic operatics that could make it proportionate to the action-crime-drama material and give it emotional credibility, and Wick’s unfathomable power to survive shootouts with any number of hired guns was given some wry nods, but a force so brutally unstoppable should be less like the Wachowskis’ Neo and more like Chuck Jones’s Road Runner.

For Chad Stahelski (this time directing solo), the new comic point of reference isn’t quite a Looney Tunes cartoon, but arguably the closest thing to it in live action cinema, Buster Keaton, a declaration I’m not making based on careful scrutiny of the film’s stylistic properties but based on the fact that one of the film’s opening shots focuses on a scene from Sherlock Jr. projected on the side of a Manhattan building. While it’s not a comparison that the film always strives for, the influence is felt and appreciated, and the in-your-face delivery of that influence to the audience also reflects a very welcome post-modern playfulness with its own identity. That identity, for what it’s worth, never successfully resolves, but Chapter 2 imperfectly points a potential path for an action movie whose split personality is half the fun.

The opening sequence — where Wick storms a garage serving as a front for the Russian mob — is better than anything in the original. First and foremost, you have Peter Stormare playing the brother of John Wick’s chief antagonist, and his bit part (confined to appearances in a single room in the first 15 minutes) is the best performance in either film. If Michael Nyqvist’s Russian crime boss was slyly parodic, Stormare’s is an abject mockery of the stereotype. Or maybe it’s just an abject mockery of “acting” as a “character” in a “movie”. Either way it’s absolutely hilarious, not just exploiting the humour of the lines as written but pouring excess all over them and singlehandedly breaking the illusion of a contiguous fiction. It’s more syrup than pancake, and I love it.

The opening also announces Chapter 2’s shift in focus in that it is completely irrelevant to the film’s plot. While there is a plot that threads the movie together and it is an entertaining plot, it’s also a lot of nonsense, and by opening with 15 minutes of wholly disconnected action rather than the studious character development of John Wick, Stahelski and returning scribe Derek Kolstad signal heavily that literary levels of dramatic structure are not the point of the plot. The point of the plot is to deliver inventive and well-staged action set pieces and moments that try to make you laugh as hard as Peter Stormare.

The plot, for what it’s worth, involves John continuing his fruitless quest to re-retire from the underworld. Instead he causes an extreme crescendo of pissing powerful criminals off, and gradually seems to accept that this is his life now, just headshotting people who try to kill you until you can get to antagonist du jour and killing him and enjoying a moment of respite before all the people who liked or worked with that antagonist tell everyone they know to kill you. It’s a formula that’s carried over from the first film and would feel stale if it weren’t for the fact that it rises to such crazy heights here; the fact that Wick gets himself into much deeper shit than turning the entire Camorra crime syndicate against him should give you a hint at how giddy this series is about turning almost literally the entire world against him.

That tidal wave of would-be killers translates to an enlarged body count, which means killing a whole lot more people on average in the handful of section pieces that give the movie reason to be. While John Wick’s action sequences derived their success almost entirely from Keanu Reeves’s ability to fluidly launch his body from one position to the next in reaction to his assailants — a quality retained and even enhanced here — Chapter 2 adds numerous elements to give each fight and shootout its own arc. That often entails greater interaction with the environment, as in a hall-of-mirrors sequence that confounds our sense of spatial orientation, or more diverse tactical decision-making, displayed up-front when Wick outfoxes his motorcycle-driving quarry in a car chase by swinging through a route with faster traffic before stopping his car dead in the middle of an intersection, right where the chopper can’t help but slam into the side and send its rider sailing into the concrete.

But the most important and effective way this Wick crafts more satisfying fight scenes is by incorporating a whole lot more table setting. John’s loadout before each fight is introduced in (sometimes laboured) detail, and those setups are paid off amply every time: in one fight his frustration at being given a single pistol with a seven-bullet magazine pays off multiple times as he angrily runs short of bullets, switches guns, throws the cast-offs at his opponents; in another, he removes a piece of kevlar shielding that was sewed into his jacket when he thinks a gunfight is over, only to desperately hold the floppy bullet-proof oval in front of him as he’s ambushed. It’s these logical (and usually comical) extrapolations from Wick’s toolkits, more than anything, that reveals the Keaton influence.

I also have to single out the film for its improvements in music and cinematography, two of the biggest problems with its prequel. While the music by Tyler Bates and new composer Joel J. Richard is only a marginal improvement from the last (thanks mostly to adopting a slightly expanded sonic palette), the cinematography, this time headed by Dan Laustsen, hasn’t just escaped liability; it’s now one of the film’s biggest assets. Laustsen retains the film’s love of colour splashes, ditches the blue and orange filters and low contrast of the last film (there are numerous scenes with neutral skin tones here), and displays a far greater utility with composition than Jonathan Sela’s work last time around. It’s not just a big step up from the cinematography in the last Wick movie I saw, but the last Dan Laustsen movie I saw: the fact that it was the sloppy visuals in The Shape of Water that gathered Laustsen all the accolades in 2017 while his work here received no attention is a prime example of how farcical the Hollywood awards season is. It also helps that the production design — with Kevin Kavanaugh heading that department this time — is lovely and well-tuned to the movie’s aesthetic and sense of humour, full of baroque parodies of the settings — museum, modern art installation, Italian hotel — that both help the film’s comical tone and give a more robust colour arrangement. It’s Kavanaugh’s best work to date, and a great example of a project that gives a production designer room to do something truly unique.

In fact, I could almost say that the improvement on offer here is nearly across-the-board. That doesn’t mean Chapter 2 is flawless, mind you. A little bit of the first film’s half-baked attempts at psychoanalyzing Wick rears its head from time to time (most irritatingly in an excruciating “I think you enjoy this” speech given by the bad guy as he hides around the corner”). There still isn’t much of a sense of palpably rising stakes and heightening tension over the full runtime. And a lot of the dialogue still feels very written, the attempt to be cool coming through much clearer than any actual sense of being cool. The music, while a bit better, is still wallpaper-y at its best and irrirating at its worth (as in a baffling remix of one of the Summer movements from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons that strips out almost all the rhythmic urgency). And finally, I’d be remiss if I said that as of this chapter this series is developing something of a problem with associating its few female characters with sexualized violence, particularly a scene where a character strips nude before slitting her wrists and lying face-up in a pool of water. I’m happy that Kolstad is pushing for more operatic levels of melodrama here, but scenes like that show a thoughtlessness about the approach that I dearly hope changes in Chapter 3, and make the overwhelmingly male crew a lot tougher to swallow.

That, ultimately, is the most telling compliment I can pay to John Wick: Chapter 2: it shows artists committed to improvement and confident enough to deliver an undeniably entertaining pop cinema experience. While I came into John Wick and Chapter 2 with a sense of obligation to stay in the loop about modern action movies, I’m actively excited to go see the new Parabellum chapter later this afternoon and find out what new ideas and improvements these artists have to offer. He may not be the Road Runner, but Wick is definitely starting to really step on the gas here.

Other Essays in This Series

John Wick
John Wick: Chapter 2
John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum

Notes on John Wick (2014)

By Willa Ross

For years, I've avoided this, its first sequel, and Atomic Blonde, in large part because the kind of acclaim they received tended to overlap heavily with The Raid 2: Berendal, a film I do not care for. The Raid 2, for my money, is a film interested in intricately choreographed action without character (let alone characters), which frequently takes as its emphasis the physical brutalization and mutilation of the body, with an expectation that this will be played sheerly for laughs. It's a film that crosses the line between a cathartic, escapist enjoyment of carefully staged violence anchored in an emotional context, and a giddy display of pain and technical virtuosity without attempting a structure or sense of progression in each action scene. Descriptions of the John Wicks tended to both explicitly cite The Raid 2 as similar, and describe John Wick in nearly identical terms.

Regardless, like the Raid movies, John Wick and its Chapter 2 sequel have been common in discussions of contemporary action cinema and its exemplars, and as someone who cares very much about the genre and would like to see its potential ways forward outside the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I can no longer ignore these. Wick, like a lot of action movies that boast technically astonishing fight choreography, is directed by two veterans of stuntwork, Chad Stahelski and David Leitch; the question with auteurs who come into the genre from this direction is whether they are only interested in feature length technical expressions of the craft they practiced outside the director's chair, or whether they're interested in dramatic modulation emotionally resonant aesthetic choices, technique that expresses more than technical strength.

The answer is that they do care — in fact, sometimes they seems to care more than their writer Derek Kolstad — though as of this first entry they’re inexperienced hands at showing it. John Wick's action deserves the praise it gets as a technical showcase for Stahelski and Leitch, their stunt team, and Keanu Reeves; it is also, thankfully, an action movie with an interest in how its characters think — not to mention it knows how to tell a fucking joke. The brutality on display here is undeniable, but the film takes its time over around 30 minutes to establish it as an almost abstract metaphor for the title character's rage: rage that, with all the senseless loss and grief that one can endure by chance in life, human beings can also enact cruelty by choice. In John Wick, the thematic locus of that cruelty remains frustratingly abstract; crime-revenge cliche explanations for the senseless pain that Wick endures are trotted out — "the past", "bad luck", "people don't change" — but don't actually find much in the narrative to support them, and tend to come off as a self-serious hodgepodge attempt to simulate emotional grandeur without doing the work for it. Nonetheless, they kill the guy's adorable fucking puppy. There's a dramatic core there to work with. I mean, I don't know about you, but I love puppies.

If Wick embraced that kinda goofy degree of emotional simplicity more, it'd probably do it a lot more good than the way it strains to show import. While I genuinely appreciate the time the film takes to establish Wick as a man suffering terrible grief in the opening sequences, both the writing and direction of these scenes are full of cliches and feel more perfunctory than they clearly intend to, with hardly any inspired moments that establish a genuine connection. (An exception: the puppy wakes up Wick just seconds before his alarm clock buzzes. Awww. I love puppies.)

Regardless, the shot direction, sound, and music of the pre-puppy-killing scenes are thoroughly unimpressive: boilerplate drama without much more to than kinda hackneyed screenplay gestures and a blue filter to lend it emotional heft. One could levy complaints at Reeves’s customarily subdued performance for not expressing more, but it’s entirely in keeping with his character. Most frustrating in these scenes is the wandering, isolated piano chords, so familiar to this kind of material that it actively saps personality out of the film when it plays (the score turns out to be by far the film’s biggest liability). One moment in particular does far more to legitimize the sorrow being pushed forward by these scenes than any other: Willem Dafoe, whose sunken features can without effort express as much long-suffered pain as any actor trying their absolute hardest, offers Wick’s single best line delivery when he tells John, with a mixture of boredom, pity, and personal melancholy, “There’s no rhyme or reason to this life. It’s days like today scattered among the rest.” Dafoe does solid work throughout, but this is plainly the moment he was cast for, and it’s the highlight of the film’s vulnerable side.

Eventually, though, the bad mobsters kill the puppy and beat up John and steal his car, and the fighting begins. I won’t go so far as to say that the plot is unimportant going forward — it’s pretty stock, but it’s a plot, and it is used to propel the action material and maintain a sense of stakes — but there’s not much reason to detail it or its effects any further than I did between those em dashes just now. This isn’t entirely a complaint, as just because something is “simple” doesn’t mean it can’t be interesting or serve the work as a whole. Still, there’s a thin line between simplicity and dullness that the film’s plotty sections sometimes fall on the wrong side of; specifically, I wish there was more playfulness in how these mobster characters are written (beyond a funny running gag that, contra standard depictions of overconfident, egomaniacal organized criminals, everyone seems kind of resigned to the fact that Wick is bound to slaughter them effortlessly).

One of the film’s chief pleasures is that slaughtering dozens of people does look hard. Partly thanks to the fact that Reeves accomplishes the vast majority of his own stunts, a sense of constant, extreme bodily exertion comes through in every gunfight. It’s not just good because it looks hard, either; I would argue that the greatest (and most commonly neglected) asset of watching an action scene is showing how combatants adopt tactics and then shift them over the course of battle, and while John Wick does occasionally fall into rote cover-and-suppress-and-shoot staging with little to distinguish the behaviour at the end of the fight from the start, it otherwise succeeds through a pliable formula: John Wick and a few dozen baddies are in a room; the baddies set the pace and direction of battle; John adapts. How John adapts presents dozens of little surprises, as if every few seconds he solves a complex puzzle using only his body and his gun.

The action moves so fast that we really do need to give Stahelski and Leitch props for just how well they understands action staging; it’s very rare that the camera’s movement and the cutting create spatial confusion, the most important objects and events are most always emphasized by the framing, and the graphic orientations and motions within the frame create clean, easily followed cuts. The only serious liability on following the action is the film’s bizarre commitment to low-contrast, low-highlight cinematography, perhaps selected because of its associations with a grittier tone and “artier” visuals; this compressed dynamic range inevitably reduces the audience’s ability to distinguish details which, in fast-paced, complicated action sequences, can make it harder than it should be to figure out who is doing what.

The overall camera positioning conceits are solid enough that I can’t help but lay some blame for this with Jonathan Sela, a cinematographer whose work I’ve yet to find cause to enjoy. Besides the contrast, Sela also has serious issues with composing interesting, well-balanced frames. The scope ratio of 2.35:1 that’s become standard issue in mass-commercialized and genre pictures is almost certainly the hardest standard frame to compose for, so heavily horizontal as it is, and Sela hardly ever martials the geometry of his shots into something memorable or expressive — and when he does, the contrast scuttles it. John Wick also opts for a look that usually favours strong, non-natural colour washes, and that can be an interesting approach with a lot of creative potential. Limiting the colour range gives the eye less means to delineate the subjects of an image, which can be compensated for by — you guessed it — a higher contrast, or careful framing. It’s all a good example of decisions that can be intellectualized in a vacuum, but wind up doing damage to each other in practice, and aren’t especially well-executed taken on their own anyway.

Unfortunately we can’t leave the film alone with that sweeping dismissal. If you’re one for reading parentheticals (and fuck everyone who’s not, am I right folks?), you probably noticed that I said the score was John Wick’s biggest liability. And it is. The music for this movie is downright awful, and once the movie exits its low gear of ominous, metallic drones and boring piano chords, it moves into the equally thoughtless but far more irritating mode of boring rock pieces, anchored by thuddingly static drum lines and generic guitar chords. Even pre-existing music like Marilyn Manson’s “Killing Strangers” fails to stand out whatsoever from the musical tapestry on display outside of the vocals. For all the failings of the photography, you can at least detect that someone wanted to think of ways to make this look different from other movies. It doesn’t come across like any effort was made to craft a distinct soundtrack here. Frankly, it sounds like something pulled from a sound library and slapped on the soundtrack with only cursory attention to the film’s emotional ebbs and flow.

Underlying all these issues is a sense that, in spite of honest efforts by Stahelski and Leitch to develop their movie’s personality beyond that of a stunt/fight choreography extravaganza, John Wick doesn’t have a clear personality that you could describe without contradicting yourself. Yet I still liked it, not only for the effort on display, but for the numerous moments when it succeeds so well, most often in moments when John dives, rolls, whips around, or tackles his way through foes who almost never seem like they’re designed to be just stupid enough kill. But it also doesn’t look anything like a revelatory piece of contemporary action cinema to me. The landscape before and after this came out in 2014 doesn’t seem that different. It’s hard to say this is more than one more shoot-em-up, scattered among the rest.

Other Essays in This Series

John Wick
John Wick: Chapter 2
John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum

“The Other Side of the Wind”: The Absence of Orson Welles

by Willa Ross

Whatever its necessarily finished-unfinished form may mean in terms of the unrealized potential of The Other Side of the Wind, there’s not another 2018 movie I’ve spent so much time thinking about. Several months later, the layers of meta-meaning in Welles’s swan-song continue to play out across a long moebius strip in my mind, and each new circuit around the loop reveals something I’d missed on the last go-round (particularly after reading Josh Karp’s excellent making-of book Orson Welles’s Last Movie).

Those who were disappointed by Wind tend to turn their attention to the fact that Welles never finished it, and therein find evidence for how this created deficiencies in the film. I don’t agree with this perspective. It seems to me that the consensus — even among the film’s defenders — that a Welles-completed cut would have been ideal has shown an unhealthy level of certainty, and there is much to appreciate in its current (final?) form that would not be possible had the film been completed under his scissors and splices before his death in October 1985. The most moving example comes up front: instead of the room-filling thunder of Welles’s low, commanding narration filling the screening room over the opening montage of stills, we hear Peter Bogdanovich, in character as Brooks Otterlake. The text is near-identical to Welles’s, with the exception of a handful of new lines in which Otterlake, the hotshot acolyte of the fading genius of cinema Jake Hannaford, admits that it’s his fault the film you are about to see has taken decades to reach viewers “because, frankly, I didn’t like how I came off. But I’m old enough now not to care how my role in Jake’s life is interpreted.”

Otterlake, of course, is almost-but-not-quite a fictional mirror of Bogdanovich himself, just as Hannaford comes close enough to Welles that we can neither psychoanalyze the real man himself through the character nor dismiss him as being loosely inspired by the real legend’s personal fears and foibles. Bogdanovich’s own career trajectory, a comparable slew of disasters following an early breakout, makes the sound of Otterlake’s tired voice admitting defeat more poignant than Welles’s comparatively detached introduction could ever have been. It completes the cycle of the two men’s relationship; it connects the loop. The question of whether the two sides of that particular moebius strip are Otterlake and Hannaford or Welles and Bogdanovich is one of the film’s great gifts to its viewer, one that a 1985 Wind could not have offered.

Whatever my objections to the assumption that the best version of Wind would be one done in Welles’s lifetime, it’s certainly natural to consider this late-born bookend as an exercise in coulda-been. That open unfinishedness is a part of the movie’s DNA, a hodgepodge of sporadically-captured vignettes filmed in various formats that could only be assembled towards a clipped, elliptical result. The difference is that now the film is broadly seen as a finished-unfinished film, whereas the original effect would have been an unfinished-finished one. It's ironic that, besides a couple party scenes, almost none of the film-without-a-film — that is, the material about the fallen director Jake Hannaford on the last night of his life — was cut into any sort of "fine" form by Welles. However, excepting the nightclub sequence that sees Hannaford’s leading man silently pursuing his subject of sexual obsession into a bathroom, Welles finished editing all of the film-within-a-film himself. So the unfinished film that Hannaford so desperately seeks to find funding for is basically Welles's finished film, and the rest of the finished film we have now is Welles's unfinished film.

Puzzles and paradoxes like this are what make the metanarrative of Wind so rewarding. It’s no wonder why Netflix released a making-of documentary, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, alongside it. To appreciate what’s been accomplished here requires a viewer unafraid to search far outside the diegesis for answers. Wind almost seems to beckon the viewer to become an academically-minded scrutinizer of its own production, hunting through history for clues to the movie’s subtext. On one hand, that sounds like something Welles probably would have hated to do. On the other, the man seemed to enjoy playing tricks on himself as much as his audience.

But The Other Side of the Wind is an allegory for more than itself. The eventual relegation of Hannaford's Hollywood comeback film — an attempt to make something in tune with the current aesthetic trends — to a drive-in screening that nobody ultimately attends is itself a reference to Touch of Evil. Welles hoped that picture would announce his commercial viability in the States, following three prior projects without major studio backing. It was ultimately distributed as a B-movie and mostly seen, when it was seen, in drive-ins, and in a shape not at all commensurate with its director's final intentions. Thus we can read the film-within-a-film and its rejection by studio executives as not only a parody of Antonioni and a funhouse reflection of Welles's Wind itself, but also a bitter reflection on the last time Welles attempted to synchronize his artistic instincts with commercial practicality.

Welles insisted that none of this was autobiography. Yet these historical rhymes, along with countless other details of character, incident, and backstory, clearly confirm to all but the most credulous adherents of his denials that, more than anything, the man wrote and photographed a film that was (at least circuitously) about himself. Yet the famously imposing figure of Welles never appears. Instead of his intended role as the prologue’s narrator, he can only be heard in a few offhand lines as a journalist, a performance he almost certainly meant for somebody else to dub over later.

There’s more where that came from, more parallels between the actors and the characters they play, and the characters and other real people, and events and themes and truth and fiction. The film's extremely protracted production history may remove Welles's personal direction and inspiration from the Wind that’s finally available to us, but they also ennoble and enrich it as a work of aging and repetition and replication and generational inheritance and film history itself. This story at once takes place over the course of 12 or so hours and 48 years — the latter quality affirmed by the newly written allusion to cell phones in the prologue.

Jakes's bon mot of "it's alright to borrow from each other, what me must never do is borrow from ourselves" is, on the surface, an empty plaudit, designed to amuse an uncritical crowd. Still, it strikes at the psychological core of Wind's characters, who literally and figuratively project themselves onto and imitate and perform as other people, but refuse to display their inner selves. The collage-documentary aesthetic Welles chose works in counterpoint to this central theme: no matter how many angles, formats, stylistic departures, and movements you use to reveal the subject, the images will always be defined by what you don't see. This reminded me of Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure, an actual documentary that insists on looking to the margins of documentation to find truth. Like so many Morris movies, SOP seems ahead of the curve for its time and place and has yet to see its more radical ideas picked up by others. The Other Side of the Wind, for its part, wrapped filming in 1976, was directed by the man who made Citizen Kane, and still saw no shortage of critical reactions that shrugged it off as being fairly unsubstantial. More than 30 years after his death and the canonization of several more of his movies, Orson Welles’s track record still can’t convince everyone to give the new stuff he tries a second thought.

Still, as painful as it is to convert that “tries” into “tried”, this pretty much wraps it up as far as new things for Welles to surprise us with (barring the discovery of his cut of The Magnificent Ambersons (or some kind of attempt to construct the Don Quixote footage into something Welles might have wanted. Who knows)). Thankfully, we’ve been left a more than worthy stylistic summation of Welles's career, and the techniques particular to him — deep-focus cinematography, lengthy, exploratory tracking shots, wide angle lenses, and, finally, near-cubist cutting patterns — are here used to photograph subjects who can never be truly known by anyone, even themselves, let alone a camera and editing bay. Like Rosebud, the tantalizingly incomplete and incoherent film-within-a-film-of-the-same-name promises a potential revelation of Hannaford's psyche that we can never truly access; likewise for Welles himself and his Wind, an approximated last testament for a man who, to the last, would disclaim that he was Jake Hannaford.

There is no Orson Welles to see here, said Orson Welles, a protestation he couldn’t have expected us to accept at face value. In the moment when the movie seems to suggest we can best "see" Jake Hannaford for who he really is — the devastating psychoanalysis by his nemesis film critic that he seems to affirm with his violent response — there is nothing to see of Jake but a disjunctive closeup that does little to place him in the space. At the moment of the slap and its aftermath, he's lost somewhere in a black void or beyond the frame, and he doesn't reappear until his final meeting with Dale back at the ranch. Maybe even more telling in this respect is the film's first visual, a photograph of the wrecked sports car that Hannaford used to end it all — a photograph in which he is nowhere to be seen. At his most exposed, Jake disappears from the picture. He vanishes into the same off-screen ether as his real-life author: the late, great Orson Welles, the most famous actor-director in the cinema's history, here remixing the meanings of that multi-hyphenation in a more original and difficult sense than anyone but him could have imagined.

Blue Mornings, Hidden Gazes: on queerness in "Liz and the Blue Bird" and "Kase-san and the Morning Glories"

by Willa Ross

I don't know about you, but for me many of the happiest moments of consuming art are coincidences: moments when a work finds synchronicity with my personal life; when an audience taps into a special, collective energy of appreciation that cannot be replicated before or after; when a double feature unwittingly presents itself. The latest such coincidence for me was seeing Kase-san and the Morning Glories and Liz and the Blue Bird within a few days of each other. Both films are yuri — anime centered on female characters in homosexual relationships — and seemed to me kindred in their approaches to high school girls discovering their queerness, despite the chasmic differences of style and tone between them.

I. Morning Glories

Kase-san and the Morning Glories, a brief feature (under one hour) that adapts select episodes from a long-running manga series, is immediately striking for what it omits. As it begins, the leads Kase and Yamada have already entered into a relationship. The removal of any courtship process quickly precludes the trope within queer coming-of-age narratives of the characters discovering their sexuality — instead, the tension of the early relationship centers on the girls’ self-esteem and perceptions of each other. Like many teenagers in love, they're deeply aware of the other's positive qualities, and view the absence of those qualities within themselves as personal failings whose discovery by their partner is bound to disappoint. For her part, Yamada is a fastidious, withdrawn gardening type with proclivities towards overtly girly dress and home decoration, while Kase is a popular track star whose short hair, height, athleticism, and comparative brashness lend a somewhat more masculine temperament. Yamada’s embarrassment is poorly hidden, shown both through wild caricature and the oh-so-anime sprouting of weeds from her head in moments of particular humiliation — and this more open emotional state makes her the natural choice as narrator and effective protagonist. Kase, on the other hand, is far more reserved with her inner life, given to expressing it quietly in moments of pained confession, or with sudden, assertive outbursts. Unlike Yamada, we may frequently wonder how Yamada feels about a given subject, or if she has any feelings on the matter at all.

All of this may give the impression that Kase-san and the Morning Glories approaches romance between girls by coding them with standard straight, cisgender traits, crafting a romantic narrative with mass appeal by making it closely proximate to the cliches of mainstream love stories. This reading seems to gain legitimacy when considered with the lack of any overt references within the film towards their coupling as being socially unusual, let alone the subject of prejudice within Japan. In other words, these qualities, taken on their own, send up classic red flags of representation: make the depiction of marginalized people more palatable by omitting social and systemic biases from the equation. Yet this is where the film's tactics of representation start, not where they end, and Morning Glories evokes a muted sense of social repression with isolated moments in the drama that allow underlying anxieties to peek through for split seconds. This elliptical approach is announced in almost literal terms in the film’s first words, a single line of prologue narration by Yamada, “We’re both girls, but…”. Navigating a romance as girls is thus evoked as something deeply felt, but never spoken. In other words, the social discouragement of queer relationships manifests not through chiding, or through measurable social exclusion, but through the seeming impossibility of its utterance, let alone confrontation.

While this often serves to complicate moments of standard teenage romance (like, for instance, the nervousness of a first kiss, or the fear of revealing a relationship to peers) with an ambiguous social element, at times it comes close to announcing itself more overtly. In one scene Yamada invites Kase into her house for the first time while her parents happen to be absent. The sexual implications of being alone in a bedroom in an empty house are lost on Yamada (who has a much more abstract sense of fear over their blossoming intimacy), but not on Kase, and after some comic misunderstanding, Kase announces her intent and willingness by pushing Yamada back onto the bed, looking over her and saying “I want to go out with you properly. I mean it.” The tonal whiplash of the moment focuses our attention and helps to announce that the subtext of social repression is nearly boiling over, and in spite of our fear over the sexually threatening positions of the characters, Kase’s face does not show frustration, anger, or entitlement, but embarrassment and sadness. Moments later, Yamada’s parents come home, interrupting their near-coitus, and Kase laughs it off and suggests “Let’s do it some other time.” While “going out properly” refers most obviously to the social pressure on teenage couples to express the seriousness of their bond through sex, in Kase’s case that’s merely a symptom of a deeper fear: that their relationship won’t advance beyond an intimate platonic friendship, and that they either won’t acknowledge their romantic feelings — and lust — or, worse, they won’t permit themselves to feel them at all. Like everything else in Morning Glories, the sequence concludes happily, with the two cuddling on the bed, acknowledging sexual desire as a component of their attraction but not necessitating the act of sexual contact in order to legitimate it.

The scene, like the rest of the movie, is overwhelmingly cute and happy-go-lucky, short on protracted crises and even shorter on conflict. That's exactly what allows its deeper issues — alluded to but never elaborated or explicated — to be cast in tonal relief. Only in the most private space possible, the bedroom, do either of the girls approach an open acknowledgement of their social erasure and marginalization. When in view and earshot of others, they behave as friends, only allowing themselves gestures of intimacy and open discussion of their relationship when there's nobody else around, until in the very last scene their love is publicly expressed, an act shown as necessary for them to fully realize a lasting and meaningful relationship. The subtlety of their oppression ensures that its seeming absence looms over the rest of the work.

II. Blue Birds

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a movie with as many shots of feet in it as Liz and the Blue Bird. Here, anxiety is acknowledged and near-ubiquitous, and it’s the expression of desire that’s never allowed to surface. Where Morning Glories magnifies fears surrounding marginalization by eliding them in all but a few key moments, Blue Bird magnifies them by eliding almost everything else. Here, it’s the romantic longing that goes unspoken, although its presence is made painfully clear in every scene via the camera and editing’s lyrical gaze and rhythm. Like Morning Glories the subjects are two high school girls, Mizore and Nozomi. Unlike Morning Glories, they are in a decidedly platonic friendship that finds itself on rocky ground as graduation approaches. Mizore is a morose introvert, unwilling to socialize with almost anyone besides Nozomi, a springy social nucleus who’s quick to smile but whose deeper thoughts register as either obscure or mercurial. Years earlier, Nozomi apparently made a concerted effort to involve Mizore in their school’s band club, and has found herself almost attached at the hip ever since. Nozomi, seems content with this, but holds Mizore at an emotional arm’s length, implicitly aware that the latter admires her as more than a friend. Nozomi neither judges Mizore’s sullen reluctance to share her thoughts and feelings nor seeks them out. There is an uneasy, unsustainable equilibrium.

Yet the film itself is happy to share Mizore’s thoughts with us, not so much adopting her perspective as empathetically (and emphatically) perceiving it. The first time we see the two spending time together, a long sequence of closeups makes clear Mizore’s romantic adoration of her friend by establishing a hypnotic cadence to the movements of Nozomi’s body: the waving of her skirt, the swishing of her ponytail, the swing of her arms. These POV shots are mixed with ones that emphasize their location (the clinically desaturated halls of their high school) and their distance from each other, and they collectively eschew traditional approaches to composition and continuity in order to suggest the emotionally disjunctive experience of unrequited love. To both put a button on this sequence as the film’s formal manifesto and make the intent of these techniques perfectly clear, it ends with a cut to a hand-drawn title card of one word: “disjoint”.

It’s a manifesto that the rest of Blue Bird makes good on, as every scene’s shape takes as much interest in quotidian gestures and poses as the interplay and subtext of character dialogue. The effect is unusual enough to be “arthouse”, but it also reminds me of the tactics that thrillers often use to maximize effect and excitement. To sit close to her love, to sense her hair falling towards their shoulder, is a euphoric experience for Mizore, and the film unearths queer affection through these and other details that go unacknowledged by characters, but land as much more than quotidian trivialities.

Art itself is taken as an important tool for understanding the girls’ connection, both for the audience and the girls themselves. A storybook film-within-the-film establishes a story of two characters whose metaphorical application to the main story fluctuates in both the audience and the characters’ minds. The process of preparing a shared musical solo becomes a means to exposit the girls’ unwillingness to fully reveal themselves to each other, until in an extraordinary musical sequence, they do. (That scene is the first of the film’s devastating double climax, preceding a scene in a lab classroom whose dialogue finds the girls stumbling towards and around their fears and desires in a masterfully written scene of awkward intimation and mutual terror.) Taken collectively these are unmistakable signals that must be actively ignored to deny their romantic implications.

While it operates beautifully as a standalone work, Liz and the Blue Bird’s status as a spin-off further ennobles and clarifies its intent. The film is based on the Sound! Euphonium frachise, which spans novels, manga, anime series and features, and features Nozomi and Mizore in minor roles. Outside Blue Bird, there is little to no implication of sexual or romantic feelings between them. In crafting a spin-off to the anime, the director, Naoko Yamada, and her regular screenwriter, Reiko Yoshida, effectively comment of the lack of representation for marginalized characters in popular franchises by depicting two who are never allowed to honestly represent themselves. Would Liz and the Blue Bird itself have been allowed to declare, in clear terms, that Mizore’s desperation to remain close to Nozomi is largely rooted in homosexual love, if Yamada and Yoshida had wanted that? Maybe. But the Sound! Euphonium anime has a reputation for queer-baiting with its character relationships, and it seems likely that a concrete depiction of same-sex romance wasn’t on the table. If that’s so, then it’s not just the prejudices of her world, but the corporate mandates of media property to which Mizore belongs that ensures she remains repressed.

Blue Bird responds to its source material’s queer-baiting by depicting characters who are unmistakably, unarguably, unambiguously queer, and yet who are not queer, because they are not allowed to be. It subtly distinguishes its political position on representation from that of the anime series by means of aesthetic deviations. For instance, the characters’ necks are elongated in comparison to the Sound! Euphonium anime to connote them as birds; for their cage, the setting before the first and last scenes is claustrophobically confined to their dingy high school. But the film’s prior speculation, about which girl is the blue bird and which is the owner who cages it and later sets it free, may be the wrong framing, a notion the film slyly puts forth itself: late in the film, a lengthy shot shows two birds soaring through the distant sky, drifting slowly and uncertainly towards and away from each other. Neither of them was or could have been caging the other. There are larger, unseen forces responsible for that.

By the end, it becomes clear that it’s actually Nozomi who most closely guards her feelings, and while the film gathers enough clues that we can intuit the wordless ending to be a happy, even romantically satisfying one, they remain just that: clues, signals, codes. They’re traces of a roiling, frightened discovery of the self that operate just under the radar of social notice. They are at once hopelessly inadequate to communicate desire between oppressed identities, and at the same time the last, best hope of doing so. Of course we’re not allowed to hear whatever it is Nozomi says that shocks Mizore in the final shot. To reveal it would be to risk everything.

III. Joint

The lens of queerness is not and should not be the only way to view either Kase-San and the Morning Glories or Liz and the Blue Bird. They reach for a broader scope of themes and character psychology than that methodology could cover, and formulating diverse perspectives on their forms and structures enriches them as works of art. Yet neither must that lens ever be discounted, forgotten, or elided in considering the works, as the omnipresence of the issues they raises is the most critical subtext of both films.

Nobody tells Kase or Mizore or Yamada or Nozomi “no.” Nobody disapproves of their friendship or any desire between them, or their heartfelt need not just for a passing fling, but for a substantive, long-term relationship. Neither film has anything like a villain or antagonist, but this is not the same as saying that nobody is responsible for the challenges these girls face in defining and exchanging their feelings for each other. Rather, the tools of oppression work against them so well that they need not announce themselves. While the texts function on a strictly literal level without acknowledging this subtext, their characters’ choices and behaviours cannot be fully explained without accounting for it. Both films bring queer stories to the screen partially by working within the strictures of mainstream presentations — Morning Glories presents a cutesy, seemingly uncomplicated and conflict-free love story, and Blue Bird operates of a spin-off of a multimedia franchise — that they proceed to deconstruct from within, without breaking the rules of the game. The full scope and implications of their politics can only be proven and understood in the same way as black holes: not by direct observation, but by the way all observable material bends towards them.

But the inescapable gravity well of that metaphor belies both films’ endings, which depict the possibility of happy, healthy, lasting and loving romances between women. Of all the tropes — both in Japanese animation and global representations of queer representation — that Blue Bird and Morning Glories reject, it’s their conscious foregoing of any tragic conclusion to gay romance that is the most satisfying, the most aspirational, and perhaps, in a global culture where only films about LGBT characters that wind up dead or miserable get considered for awards, the most radical. What ultimately inspires and endures from each is their concluding visions of two people who love each other and, somehow, achieve safety, openness, and unity.