One of my favourite things about film is how well it works with acumulation. Seeing a director struggle with his favorite themes over and over throughout her films. Or discovering a new interesting voice, like Jessica Hausner and Eugene Green this festival, and diving into the rest of their work. A less than great film can still be of interest due to how it plays into a larger body of work (For example, Corneliu Porumboiu's film The Second Game is just the director and his dad discussing the art of refereeing over pictures of a boring football game from 1988, but since refereeing has been used by the director as a metaphor for how a justice system should work in general, the discussion took on a much larger significance for me). Literature also works a bit like that, of course, and my favourite collection of art will probably always be the writings of Thomas Pynchon, but then, you can't really read four-five books in a day, as would be the equivalent experience to the great festival I'm having at the moment.
So because of that joy, I tend to prioritize seeing films by directors I've already seen films from. And yet, while Assayas is one of the directors of this festival I've seen most films by, I originally hadn't planned to check this one out. Just as I didn't watch Something in the Air, his 2012 film on the aftermath of 68, when it played at CPH:PIX13. I've liked most of his films. But one way or another, they don't really acumulate well in my mind. He has his themes, but they are really diverse. Clouds of Sils Maria, about female actors in modern filmmaking, probably seems most like his Irma Vep from 1996, which also included examples of different kinds of filmmaking, as does this one, showing clips from an old silent film, and an invented superhero blockbuster. He's also concerned with a sense of the death of the modernist values from the sixties-seventies, and how they got replaced by something perhaps more phony, as was seen in Carlos and Something in the Air, and in this one is represented by the split between Juliette Binoche's middleaged actress Maria Enders, and Chloë Grace Muntz' young starlet Jo-Ann Ellis. They are going to star in a staged version of the play Maloja Snake, a play about a destructive lesbian relationship between a young, freespirited girl and an elder, buttoned up woman. Maria Enders played the young girl in her breakthrough performance, but now she gets the role of the elder woman.
That play is written by a playwright named Wilhelm Melchior, who commits suicide at the beginning of the film. He is supposedly based on Rainer Maria Fassbinder, who died in 82. Fassbinder would have been Melchior's age, had he lived, but there is still the sense to me that the film is depicting a kind of play that hasn't really been relevant for a much longer time than the film implies. Binoche also seems both a bit too young and a bit too old in a paradoxical way. I got the sense that she was supposed to have played the young actress as an 18-year old a bit more than 20 years ago, but Binoche is 50. On the other hand, I associate young Binoche not with serious modernist filmmaking, but the postmodernist 'cinema du look' like Leon Carax' Mauvais Sang. There is a sense of being out of time with this film, which might actually be the thing I have a hardest time with in Assayas. He seems out of time. Not as in 'timeless' but as in neither fish nor fowl. His handling of his themes seem dispassionate at times.
What I've just written seems way too auteurist, as if films should only be considered according to their directors. Of course, a 'body of work' could work for every kind of person involved in filmmaking, from a scriptwriter to a cinematographer. Most people judge films worthy of watching based more on actors. And in this film, the actresses might actually be the ones who bring more 'baggage' to the film, so to speak. Especially one actress. Most of the film actually focuses on Maria Enders and another young woman, her personal assistant Valentine, played by Kristen Stewart, who goes with her to Wilhelm Melchiors mountain home at Sils Maria, to rehearse the play. The clear subtext of the situation with the play is that Maria Enders has been replaced by a younger, more suitable actress. But with regards to the filmmaking situation, it's Kristen Stewart who has been replaced by Chloe Grace Muntz, as it's Stewart who has both had the sort of troubled tabloid existence and the same attempts at balancing franchise filmmaking with more personal works, that the young Jo-Ann Ellis shows in the film. I like this fact, since it brings a twist into what could be a boring 'generational' conflict between old and good and new and bad. But the film positions that the battle might be more in the women of every generation having to fight for the position as a 'timeless' actress such as Maria Enders. This changes a late scene, where a young filmmaker dispirits the antics of actresses of his own generation such as Ellis, and shows him more like a person without solidarity for his fellow youngsters.
From What is Before (Lav Diaz, Phillipines, 2014)
More acumulation: A film that is 5½ hours long. Perhaps it didn't need to be quite as long, there could probably be 30-45 minutes excised without causing any major damage to the fabric of the tale. But again: The cinema of director Lav Diaz becomes more interesting to me, the more of I see. I saw two of his films last year, his 4-hour 'breakthrough' Norte, the End of History, and Storm Children: Book One, a 2½ hour documentary on the aftermath of Typhoon Yolanda. He has made a bunch of films before that, most of which are very long and hard to come by, so it'll take a while before I get a grip on him, I think. Especially since he is currently in the midst of truly establishing himself in the pantheon of living directors, with Norte having premiered in Cannes, and From What is Before having won the Golden Leopard at Locarno. Also, the two films are very different, with Norte being plot-heavy, in colour, and with a very moving camera, and From What Is Before being black-and-white, more about mood than plot, and with a static camera that only rarely pans side to side. I wonder how his style was before, and how it will be hereafter. Probably, there will be another many-hour-long film next year to check out.
It is truly a privilege to spend so many hours keenly observing the problems of the Philipines. This film takes place in the early 70'ies, two segments taking place in 70 and 71, before the bulk of the film happening in 72. So many scenes in the first stretch of the film feature characters slowly moving towards something. It seems as if they are gathering together at the location for the film, though most of them have lived there for a young time. In 70, we watch as a procession brings sisters Itang and Joselina to a place where they act as healers, in a long interlude with music and dancing - already, this was where the first of the audience lost patience and left. In 71, Christian priest Father Guido has arrived, and is kindly but firmly correcting the way the sisters act and believe. Joselina was unwell from the beginning, but she succumbs more and more to madness and selfharm as the film progresses. There is also Sito, the elder rice-farmer who has taken in young boy Hakob, Tony, a winemaker, and Heding, a saleswoman with an annoying attitude, who spreads rumours and sticks her nose in everything. Then, in 72, the darkness comes. Cows are hacked to death. Huts are burned down. A man is found dead at a crossroads. And Philipino politics will also soon intrude in a big way.
5½ hours is a long time, but it does allow us to truly get to know the place of the film. The camera will hold steady and observe for a long time, as characters perhaps walks on a mountaintop, or perhaps works inside their homes. We get to know these hillsides, seashores, homes, fields and forrests, churches, schools, roads and rivers, from seemingly every angle. And there is definitely a sense of atmosphere. It is cloudy all the time, it rains a lot, and since the soundwork seems to be done really cheaply with microphones stuck on the actors, there is an almost constant roaring of wind on the soundtrack. Also, we get to know these characters through the way they talk, with people using words from Philipino, English and Spanish languages seemingly at random, but much accordingly to the status and education of each person. The rich characters in Norte did the same, so I think I'm learning something about society and language in the Phillipines.
The film is compared to Haneke's The White Ribbon in the programme, another black and white movie about a small society where political evil intrudes. But that comparison, while understandable, is a bit superficial, as there is a definite difference in theme in the two films. In The White Ribbon, evil comes from the characters themselves, we watch as the pathology that would lead to the Reich is first blossoming. In From What Is Before, the evil intrudes on a society from the outside (so a more fitting comparison might be with something like Cabaret). Not all of the characters are innocent, and there has seemingly always been an undercurrent of violence this place, but there is still a dichotomy between the mostly good poor rural people, and the mostly evil and callous government forces who intrude on them. Norte had quite the same, with the intellectual recreating the Crime from Crime and Punishment, and the poor man receiving the Punishment. This scheme might seem a bit simplistic, and I'm not entirely sure it needed 5½ hours to be put forth, much less so an assortment of films of that length. But the documentary Storm Children powerfully observed how neglegted the poor and dispossed were in the Philipinnes, even in the aftermath of a major catastrophe like a once-in-a-century Typhoon. That is so far what I like most in Diaz' cinema, and it is the reason that I'd rank the three films Storm Children > From What is Before > Norte. They work best when they are simply concerned with observing what the country has not wanted to observe. Oh, how they observe, for hours and hours and hours. I'll look forward to yet another dispatch in a years time or so.
