two films by a true independent

by Donald Lyons

Existence is suffering; the cause of suffering is desire; there is a cessation of suffering, called nirvana, or total transcendence; and there is a path leading to the end of suffering.
-- entry on "Buddhism" in the Columbia Encyclopedia

Christopher Münch's Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day, an 87-minute film in Rob Sweeney's lushly textured black and white with a title from Neruda, is a poem of haunted desire. The story is piquant enough. In 1945 John Lee, a 23-year-old American of half-Chinese, half-French ancestry (father Chinese, mother a WWI warbride), becomes obsessed with rescuing from destruction the Yosemite Valley Railroad (YVRR). The 78-mile strip of wood and steel -- along with its locomotives, passenger cars, and freight cars -- was built in the 1860s by men like John's grandfather, "coolies" imported and exploited for the purpose; alone in his room, John watches flickering old newsreel footage of the railroad under construction. And yet, John's desire for the railroad -- this metallic snake slithering through some of the planet's most Edenic scenery -- reflects less a quest for poetic justice for his grandfather than an irrational, impractical obsession with an ambivalent human achievement.

Color is an infinitely melancholy meditation on the ambiguities of technology and of human endeavor in general. Münch loves the lonely plangency of the piano: Bach's Goldberg Variations, written to relieve the "pain and insomnia" of Bach's patron, reverberate through his 1991 film, The Hours and Times; here, it is, especially, Erik Satie, whose Pieces froides (Cold Pieces) and Airs a faire fuir (Airs That Chase Away) piano student John is seen at one point distractedly playing.

The opening images, worthy of a Sung landscape, contrast nature and culture: shapely sprays of misted water fall lazily through the air; then, a railroad track, which in turn grows dim beside a glowing stream winding through a canyon full of tall evergreens. A white sedan moves very slowly on the right of the screen down a leafy, twilit suburban street (the setting is Pasadena, where MŸnch himself was born in 1962), and we hear in voiceover, "The year the war came to a close was the year I fell in love for the first time, whether it was with a person or a place or just an idea I couldn't have said. Later of course I came to realize it was all of these." John, portrayed by John Lee with the rigid, Egyptian gravity that characterizes much of the playing in this film, is painfully breaking up with his girlfriend, a pianist who senses his restless lack of love. 4F because of a heart problem, John has an engineering degree from college and works maintenance on trolleys, "kept rolling because of the war even if their days were numbered." His home is a gloomy warren of empty spaces fitfully enlivened by the flirtatious antics of a bratty but affectionate younger sister. A family car ride on saved gas coupons -- distant, cold parents in front, restless kids in back -- winds up in El Portal, where John sees a poster announcing the YVRR's impending sale for scrap. Walking with his sister through tall woods, he picks up from the ground a small Indian artifact; how much less intrusive, is the quiet import, was the Indian presence in the region.

Intrigued, John attempts to express his feeling in a postcard, but winds up crossing out his words: this, unlike the dazzlingly glib Hours and Times, is a film about sad inarticulateness. At Merced, base of the YVRR, John meets its laconic, bachelor engineer (a toneless but compelling Michael Stipe), who's fortune-cookie philosophical about things ("We came like water, like the wind we'll go"), and the warm, fatherly ex-owner (an enjoyable Henry Gibson), about whom it is said by the engineer, "The railroad was his woman and she broke his heart."

A couple of formally composed farewell scenes see John leave home to pursue the YVRR: suitcase in hall, he sits in a dim diningroom drinking beer and munching cereal ("Good combination," cracks sis, cigarette in ear); later, he puts flowers in the hands of his intently reading mother. Such Münch tableaux have the still, mysterious affectlessness of frescoes in a pyramid, and the bleakness of Antonioni setups. Up in the valley for good, John stays first in the majestic, mission-oaky vastness of the Ahwahnee Hotel and later in a boardinghouse run by a fussy, fragile old local woman. John and the engineer actually manage smiles as they drive a locomotive belching black smoke through ravines and across bridges; a piano plays, appropriately, Charles Ives's The Unanswered Question. Failing to attract passengers, the two men go fishing and encounter an at-first-censorious Park Service ranger, Nancy (a subtle Jeri Arrendondo), who orders them to extinguish their cooking fire and opines, "This place is too beautiful to build a railroad through it." Nancy's view is the movie's, in some moods and shots; but not altogether. John and Nancy become lovers, while the engineer smolders in misogynist pique.

On the eve of a vain trip to D.C. to seek Congressional help, John takes Nancy aboard a private car; she's uncomfortable in this robber-baron bauble. But then -- it's a movie of tortured paradox -- come two moments emblematic of natural happiness: a kiss crosscut with cloudy mountains; Nancy swimming in an (overexposed) moonlit lake with a big white dog.

Hungover, the engineer derails the train on the morning of Nancy's intended visit, but she just takes the bus. Despairing of the YVRR's future and of what is pretty clearly a love for John, the engineer is treated gently by John, who asks him, "Why are you always so polite with me?" As in Hours and Times, a beloved John tries to ease the pain of an adoring friend. Sex with Nancy troubles John by its impermanence: "Why does anything have to be this good and then end?" It's really more a question of John's incapacity for closeness, for love, as becomes clearer in a scene by a lake where he takes off his shirt ("You're in pretty good shape for a white guy who sits in an office"; "I'm not a white guy") but withdraws ("Why don't you come closer?"; "I can't"). More or less saying goodbye to Nancy on the observation platform of that private car, he says of himself self-pityingly: "He's kind of a failure and a Chinaman, once in a while if he's drunk enough he can bang ont a tune; somehow he caught hold of something magnificent and somehow he let it go." Does he mean the railroad or the woman? Two discordantly beautiful scenes highlight John's deadness, alienation, self-walling-off: he visits an Asian-staffed bordello for a blowjob ("Are you more white or more Chinese?" asks the woman); he is visited by his sister, suddenly grown up, engaged, no longer playful. He takes her to look at an abandoned gambling club in an old Chinatown (triste montage of long-untouched implements).

With the bankrupt YVRR being torn up, John returns home. There he works for his father rewiring warehouses in LA's Chinatown, and after work haunts the railroad yards behind the beautiful white stucco LA station. "Were it not," he muses, "for a terrible flaw in my character, the YV would still exist as a common carrier." What flaw? There was no flaw except his desiring the railroad in the first place. The film's final images suggest, however, a less self-lacerating, more reconciled, more tranquil, if no less tragic assimilation by John of life and death and intrusive desires: he walks a ruined track not in the Yosemite but on a dry, flat plain somewhere (Münch filmed it in Nevada) at dusk, and sees nature reclaiming its contours. There's a suggestive shot of an angular X-beam jutting angrily out above curved mountains. John sees that whatever is built "lives on in the desert or inside a guy." He leaves the frame to the sunset and the wind (like the end of Blowup).

Born in Pasadena, Münch chose to grow up with his mother, a writer who lived in La Jolla, near San Diego. His education was, he says, free-form; he hung out in bookstores a lot. He was playing with cameras and making shorts as a kid. At 15, he made a prize-winning documentary about the animals at the San Diego zoo and crewed for the local PBS station. The filmmakers he came to cherish will not surprise: Bergman, Bresson, Ford, Keaton, Antonioni, and especially Satyajit Ray. I've seen a few minutes of In Laura's Garden, an unfinished film from 1987 about a reclusive young man meeting a girl he'd long adored but despaired of getting to know. Undercurrents of blocked emotion were already a Münchian motif.

He emerged into the glare of glory in 1991 with a 57-minute black-and-white masterpiece, The Hours and Times, an invented version of a visit in late April 1963 by John Lennon and manager Brian Epstein to Barcelona. A wittily verbal comedy of torment and desire, clumsy frustration and surprise fulfillment, Hours was written (by Münch, like Color) very fast: "The script just came to me, I was compelled to do it." The title is from a Shakespeare sonnet about homoerotic passion, but the thing might have been called, like the later Whit Stillman movie, Barcelona, for it is truly about the place. Opening shots go from the rectangular docks and cranes of the harbor to the curvy architectural transgressions of Gaudi, sinuous and polymorphous.

The film is, stylistically, a rondo of permutations of the two-shot: John and Brian sit together on a plane, face across tables, look into mirrors as John plays harmonica above Brian's head, grapple awkwardly and abortively in a bathtub, watch frozenly Bergman's The Silence (a film that, like Hours and Times, takes place largely in a hotel and involves buggery). John broods in extreme closeup with hurt Brian out of focus -- and so on. The film works kaleidoscopic turns on the ways two tough, pained souls -- faces, rather -- can compose themselves in relation to each other.

The two performers -- David Angus as Epstein, full of Jewish angst, homosexual longing, and epigrammatic panache; Ian Hart as Lennon, brimming with street cheek -- bring Münch's tense wit to life. The adoring teacher--adored pupil dynamic becomes evident at once on the plane when the dozing John, tenderly watched by Brian, awakens to say, "I had a dream I was a circus clown but the circus was underwater -- somewhere in Japan, I think -- everything was blue, normally I associate red with the circus." Brian relates the dream to Matisse's La Danse. In the hotel, John brings the conversation around to less cultured topics like spitting in soup, pissing in pools, and relaxing during anal penetration (the last is Brian's contribution). Very funny, but sad, too, as when John clarifies, "I've never met a man like you, but I don't really want to have it off with you."

The two wander around Barcelona and promise to meet there again in ten years (when in fact Brian would be dead and the Beatles split). They have neatly parallel experiences apart: both field phonecalls from Liverpool -- John from wife Cynthia and Brian from his mother. Thinking about Cynthia, John remarks, a bit prophetically, "Sometimes I want a woman to push me like a strong wind, sometimes I want a woman to eat my shit." This brilliant audacity, this anarchic play is a note absent from Münch's second film. Later, Brian fumbles a seduction of a bellboy, while John enjoys a privileged moment with stewardess Marianne (a pre-Raphaelite and smart Stephanie Pack); sizing up the John-Brian situation ("You torment him, don't you?") and deflecting John's offer to eat her cunt, she voices a (mildly anachronistic) feminism -- or rather, as she puts it, a desire to "remain unbalanced and free" -- and pulls out the latest Little Richard "twist" 45, which John hasn't heard. The song seems to dissolve what was bitter and brittle in John; as he begins to move to the music, we see a Lennon irradiated by music, the genius inside the punk. He dances in rapt, lost, jerky, twistlike movements; on the second try, he pulls Marianne up out of her chair and together they attain a smooth carnal harmony -- the opposite of the just-preceding clumsiness in the tub with Brian. And yet this ease with a woman does not work against John's closeness to Brian. Quite the contrary. After a few fades to white -- a recurring punctuation mark in the film -- Brian wakes up next to a sleeping John and walks out on the balcony/roof, which triggers a flashback to the roof of his parents' store in Liverpool where he used to ply the youth with a lover's pleas: "Do I bore you?... You'll never leave me, will you?" Back in Barcelona, cheeky cruel John teases Brian about the bullfights "with all that pageantry and grace with pressure and so forth." Brian says they could leave the spectacle and John ambiguously ripostes, "And have a cigarette?" -- the film's last words.

Even if fulfilled for a moment in Barcelona, poor sad Brian seems like one sentenced to frustration and tragedy. As in Color, desire is both engine of action and agent of disaster. To want, in the images and words of Christopher Münch, is to lose. His pictures express a terrible loneliness, but, they breathe also a deep serenity. Next to MŸnch's studies of earthly beauty and desire, much current Hollywood-Buddhist chic looks like Quo Vadis. But it should be stressed how nimbly Münch can, when he wants, cut the Tennysonian gloom with raunchy wit and wild sexuality.

Münch's next project, tentatively entitled Backward Looks, Far Corners, will recount his own mother's search for her birth mother. It will be largely set on the island of Manhattan, which will be fascinating to glimpse through this extraordinary filmmaker's calm, estranging eyes.

Donald Lyons covers theater for The Wall Street Journal.

© 1997 by Donald Lyons