L'illusionnist

The Illusionist is absolutely lovely.

The film concerns an aging French stage magician.  He practices an art that has gone out of vogue in a world that has passed him by.  What happens to him is, well, lovely.

The Illusionist, not to be confused with the very fine Edward Norton movie of the same title, has little dialogue.  It could have been a Chaplin film, with that Chaplinesque combination of comedy and pathos, all told with movement and photography and music.  In this case, however, the film uses a style of animation (it was nominated for Best Animated Feature in 2010) that recalls watercolors.  This gives it a soft and pleasing aesthetic, and it helps evoke a world just a little bit past, just a little bit mysterious.  The film’s music complements its visuals, accentuating and playing with them, giving The Illusionist a life beyond the screen.

My mind keeps coming back to the same word: lovely.  Lovely animation, lovely music, lovely everything.  I love it.

Somewhere

Sofia Coppola is one of the most audacious artists working in film.

Her latest, Somewhere, has the barest hint of a three-act structure.  It doesn’t seem to care where its people go.  Nothing blows up, nobody falls in love, the fate of the world hangs not in the balance.  Basically, Coppola uses it to explore ennui.  It is absolutely fascinating.

In Somewhere, Stephen Dorff plays a movie star who appears to live at the Château Marmont, a swanky hotel in West Hollywood (Fun fact: I used to know a guy who’d been mayor of West Hollywood.  His name was Steve Martin, and he was a lawyer who always had a funny story about some sex-related case he’d worked on.  We called him Steve Martin the Sex Lawyer.).  He has an ex-wife, a daughter, several hangers on, and a brother whose company he enjoys.  He has unlimited access to sex, drugs, and all the accouterments of the high life, and he’s empty inside.  He doesn’t love his work, he isn’t very good at sex, and he’s lost interest in pretty much everything but his daughter.  This is a film about a guy who’s going through the motions.

So what makes Somewhere fascinating?  What makes us care about some lazy rich guy’s ennui?  Coppola’s observational power does it.  When we watch Somewhere, we feel like one of Wim Wenders’s angels, looking on sympathy as this fragile human puts his faith in things and drugs and sensations.  We feel for him as he comes to realize that they are nothing, that the finest food and drink are ashes in his mouth, that he is dead inside.  We hope that he’ll find his way, that he’ll learn that detachment is a wall that doesn’t keep the world away from him, but him away from the world.  We urge him, silently, to engage: to engage the daughter who loves him, to engage the work for which he’s suited, to engage not living, but life.

Perhaps he will.  I don’t know.  But I do know that Coppola brought me into his world, as she has brought me into the worlds of people before him.  She made me care.  She made me engage.  She made me evaluate facets of my own life (he writes, from yet another empty hotel room).  Her steady gaze makes me not just look, but see.  I expectantly wait her next film and the opportunity to see once more.

Blue Valentine

I couldn’t wait for Blue Valentine to end.  The film, composed as a juxtaposition between the blossoming romance of a young couple and the stagger toward divorce of that same couple a few years on, felt too authentic, too sharp.  I felt like I was privy to the bedroom conversations of real people, and I felt like I was sticking my nose in their business.

Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling play the couple in two phases of their lives: young people with poor life management skills and older people with poor communications skills.  As young people, Williams is the kind of woman who chooses the wrong men, and Gosling is the kind of man who can unwittingly destroy the dreams of a smart, ambitious woman.  As older people, they’re a couple who talk past one another, who drink too much, who have become poison.  These were the kind of people I avoided when I was in my twenties, and they’ve grown into the kind of people I avoid in my forties.  I wanted nothing to do with either of them.

Williams and Gosling are very good at playing their roles, but they played people I didn’t want to be around.  I didn’t want to watch them fall in love because, even without the spoiler built into the film’s structure, I knew how things would work out for them.  I didn’t want to watch their relationship fall apart because I felt like that was their personal business and I shouldn’t get involved.

To steal a phrase from the brilliant Les Phillips, I think that Blue Valentine was the best Blue Valentine it could be.  But given the choice, I’d rather not have spent two hours with these people.