FILM COMMENT HOME
TABLE OF CONTENTS
BUY THE NEW ISSUE!
ART & INDUSTRY BY AMY TAUBIN:
NEW: FATIH AKIN'S HEAD-ON AND DANIEL BURMAN'S LOST EMBRACE
ONLINE EXCLUSIVES
SIGN UP FOR
E-NEWS
READ MARCH E-NEWS
FORUM
ARCHIVE
NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
WALTER READE THEATER
FILMLINC.COM HOME
COMING IN July/August 2005:
Wong Kar-wai's 2046 by Amy Taubin & Nathan Lee
Elaine May by Chuck Stephens
Françoise Dorléac by Melissa Anderson
Werner Herzog's documentaries by Paul Arthur
Cannes coverage
And much more
Threeway
A Film Comment Online Exclusive
A trio of world-class filmmakers go down the runway: Wong soars, Soderbergh crashes, and Antonioni never takes off
By Nathan Lee
above: Wong Kar-wai's The Hand
Eros, declared Sappho, is bittersweet. She was the first to say it, according to poet-classicist Anne Carson, who translates the poet's adjective (glukupikron) more literally as "sweetbitter." "If her ordering has a descriptive intention," Carson writes, "eros is here being said to bring sweetness, then bitterness . . . she is sorting the possibilities chronologically."
Eros the omnibus - a trio of shorts by Wong Kar-wai, Steven Soderbergh, and Michelangelo Antonioni - is likewise chronologically sweetbitter. Encountered in stone cold ignorance of In the Mood for Love and 2046, Wong's deft miniature The Hand would bring a flush to every cinephile on earth. Tossed in their lap, it's a handjob for the Wong cult. Putting the error in Eros, Soderbergh tossed off Equilibrium, and it wobbles. Whatever else may be said of Antonioni's The Dangerous Thread of Things, it compels attention simply by existing: if a nonagenarian Schoenberg plonked his head on a piano, and someone was around to transcribe the notes, we'd be writing essays. That Eros is hard to love won't surprise anyone who's seen Aria, Ten Minutes Older, 11'09"01, Three· Extremes, or Four Rooms. The omnibus format is, on the whole, omnibusted, though every now and then it enables the theatrical release of a major work.
"The reach of desire is defined in action: beautiful (in its object), foiled (in its attempt), endless (in time)." Carson is discussing Sappho Fragment 105a ("an inchoate little poem"), but she might as well be describing
Days of Being Wild. Rhetorical convenience notwithstanding, the erotic sensibility of ancient Greek lyric is eminently applicable to the study of Wong Kar-wai, hypothetical Hong Kong love child of Sappho and Godard. Etymologically, "eros" denotes absence, lack. Wong's collection of Sixties period pieces achieve much of their hypnotic magnetism through the pull of things not there. Every floorboard, tabletop, and patterned swatch of wallpaper in 2046 vibrates with vertigo, the controlled swoon of an exquisite Proustian exertion.
In the Mood for Love contrives its mood from the unseen, unspoken. Even the mise-en-scène empties out, habitually positioning the (ostensible) subject at the far edge of the frame, filling the composition with negative space. Taken to extremes in 2046 and The Hand, this spatial decadence is the very medium of Wongian erotics. "A space must be maintained or desire ends," notes Carson.
The Hand opens on an immaterial volume of shadow tenuously fixed to the recognizable world by raindrops on the soundtrack, a pale rectangle of hotel signage, and the timid glow of a wall sconce. (Wong is the poet of the wall sconce as Godard is the philosopher of the lampshade.) The next shot refracts this initial composition down a gloomy hotel corridor, as if through a prism. Then a face; a pencil moustache; a sharp black suit. Now a voice from offscreen, languid and feminine. They exchange dialogue as terse, elliptical, and evocative as a lyric salvaged on papyrus.
Don't come here anymore. It's contagious.
No, it's okay. I've made the alterations.
Forget it. That man's already left.
·
Do you still remember . . . how we met?
Yes.
And do you remember my hand?
Yes, I do.
Cutting to an empty stairway, The Hand reaches back in time to remember where is here, who is contagious, what has been altered. Zhang (Chang Chen) is an apprentice tailor; Miss Hua (Gong Li), a high-class prostitute, is his most lucrative client. Zhang pays regular visits to deliver spectacular qipao dresses, and is made to wait in a luxurious foyer - the hallucinatory living room from Twin Peaks teleported into
Time Regained. In medium shot, Zhang listens to lovemaking through the wall. In a startling, impossible shift of perspective, the camera assumes the POV of the eroticized wall, Zhang staring directly at us. Thick with mirrors and tricky perspectives, The Hand is a poem of erotic triangulation between Zhang, Hua, and the audience.
Miss Hua emerges, flawless, from her lovemaking. Spying a bulge in Zhang's trousers, she orders him to disrobe, slides her hand up the curve of his ass, caresses his shuddering flesh. "Remember this feeling, and you'll make beautiful clothes." He does, he does. Moments later there appears one of the most ravishing costumes ever recorded on film: a shimmering haute couture qipao, drenched in obsidian embroidery.
For the next 30 minutes, The Hand drifts through several years of Zhang's fascination with his client, whose fortunes ebb and flow along with the curves of her body, of which the tailor has unbearably intimate knowledge. The look, feel, plot, and players are all of a piece with In The Mood For Love and 2046, though Wong indulges some unusually assertive melodrama. Indulges or perhaps calculates: The Hand pens a self-reflexive ars poetica. It distills the qipao trilogy of Days, Mood, and 2046 to comment on the aesthetic. Zhang's craft is analogous to Wong's; The Hand points to the making of qipao as a radiant symbol of the filmmaker's art. Both have devoted themselves to the meticulous study of surface, the art of glamour and enchantment, kinesthesia. They are artisans who specialize in intricate tactility, handcrafted contours. They hide form to reveal it, work variations on patterns. Zhang inserts his arm into a sheath of sequined fabric with the same voluptuous longing of Christopher Doyle's lambent prowls.
Wong's famous cinematographer gets all the extra credit, but if there's a secret auteur of The Hand it's longtime collaborator William Chang. In his capacities as editor, production designer, and costumer, he's like Thelma Schoonmaker, Dante Ferretti, and Sandy Powell rolled into one triple-threat genius. His contribution to Wong's oeuvre in general, and the recent work in particular, is impossible to overestimate, if difficult to accurately credit. Who is responsible for the montage of In the Mood for Love, which tends to occur from object to object as if impelled from within the production design itself? You can confuse the femme fatales of 2046, but the collective look is unforgettable. The Hand was extended to Eros in admiration of Antonioni, but it secretly salutes the right-hand man.
above: Steven Soderbergh's Equilibrium
Stephen Soderbergh's ambitions for Equilibrium are succinctly put in his press kit Director's Statement, which reads, in its entirety: "I wanted my name on a poster with Michelangelo Antonioni." That he has accomplished; all else is debatable. Possibly the least erotic movie in the Soderbergh oeuvre - and I'm not forgetting Gray's Anatomy - Equilibrium stars Robert Downey Jr. as an angsty, Fifties advertising executive undergoing psychoanalysis with a shrink played by Alan Arkin. Feeling horny yet?
Tensed up on the Freudian couch, Nick Penrose (Downey) describes his recurring (and deeply unerotic) erotic dream of a mysterious woman. Dr. Pearl (Arkin) meanwhile is transfixed by an unseen attraction outside his office window, peering and leering through a set of increasingly large binoculars. Nick unburdens; Dr. Pearl fusses with a paper airplane; their cross-purpose fixations are mildly - very mildly - amusing. This being a Soderbergh film, there must be juggled time frames and photographic tonalities. Nick falls asleep into dream, and the neurotic noir scenario is replaced by cool, contemporary naturalism and a narrative conundrum. Who is dreaming of whom you will ask, before answering: who cares?
above: Michelangelo Antonioni's The Dangerous Thread of Things
Hardcore Antonioni-ites will make their case for The Dangerous Thread of Things, a passable trance film with grotesque acting. Lounging in the shade of a swanky villa, topless Cloe (Regina Nemni) snips at her peevish husband Christopher (Christopher Buchholz), who returns her carping tit for tat. They motor up to a pellucid lakeside landscape and assume the Existential Anxiety Posture. "How come we've never been here before?" Christopher blankly wonders of the Edenic view, and drags Cloe onward to the mysteries of . . . lunch. A mysterious woman (Luisa Ranieri) gallops bareback along the shore. Inscrutably motivated, Cloe rolls her wineglass off the table, triggering a swerve of inscrutably motivated camerawork. After lunch they disappear into a vaginal thicket. Cloe sticks her foot in mud. "It's funny, isn't it? You're always looking for purity and end up in shit." It is kind of funny, in an endearing, slightly embarrassing kind of way.
Cloe inexplicably exits the narrative as Christopher stumbles over Linda, the Horse Woman, and chases her around her apartment. They make sloppy, silly love. The Dangerous Thread of Things has entered dangerously corny terrain. An indeterminate temporal ellipsis; Cloe poses near a runaway pack of horses; Christopher calls from Paris in a semi-reconciliatory mood; existential snow is falling. "Everything's so damn white here!" Everything (which is to say, not much) climaxes back at the seaside, where Cloe and Linda engage in a nude interpretive dance that would embarrass a lesser acolyte of Maya Deren. Through kindness (or perversity) one might defend the clumsy acting as a benevolent, if inadvertent, dissonance that further abstracts a purposefully abstract texture. Or maybe not: "desultory Eurotrash horndoggery," scoffed Variety, in what is likely to be the consensus.
Good sex, like good filmmaking, is all about a continuum of attention. Eros begins with its eye on the ball (or rather, with its hand on Zhang's balls), distracts itself to flaccidity out the window, then meanders back to space out on some boobies. It's a shame pervy Pedro Almodóvar didn't fill the central slot, as was originally intended, although in a way, the qualitative loop-de-loop makes for the perfect date movie. Let Wong work you up, fool around during the Soderbergh (that's all he's doing anyway), then curl up in your seat cozy with the endorphin-depleted Antonioni.
© 2005 by Nathan Lee
