Museum Hours (Jem Cohen, 2013)

by James Hansen

A tender, intimate portrait of care and friendship, life and art, Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours may be best observed in the position of a wanderer. Anne (Mary Margaret O’Hara) makes an unexpected trip to Vienna to care for a dying family member. In Vienna, Johann (Bobby Summer), a museum guard, befriends Anna. He becomes her guide and they travel around a number of unique spaces – the hospital, the museum, and the city at large. Cohen’s fine directorial eye shows Anne and Johann as almost floating around the city. The beautifully rendered scenes softly flow from one to the next, as if they are leaves blowing in the wind or billiard balls gliding across a table.

Continue reading...

A Tidy Mosaic: Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley)

by James Hansen

Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell maps out the mosaic-like narrative of her discovery that her father, Michael Polley, was, in fact, not her biological father. In making a film about her past and the relationship of her parents, Polley’s story spans her entire family history, stretching across space and time to reconstruct the story of her mother and the extramarital affair that lead to her birth. The film includes interviews with various family members and archival 8mm home footage, as well as reenactments of false events and recreations of supposedly ephemeral material. The film attempts to grapple with the refracted shards of fact and fiction, history and memory. Indeed, Polley’s narration and the possibly false interviews of actors playing Polley’s siblings*** point the audience directly toward these ambivalences time and again. While there remain moments in which the curtain is specifically lifted, Stories We Tell doesn’t attempt to trick its audience. Instead, it often explicitly states its intention to create and/or work through a slippage between the past and the present. 

This decision ends up cutting two directions at the same time. First, it places the audience in a place of comfort, more easily navigating the vagueries of the narrative. There is a little question what the film is “about” if only because the figures tell us time and again exactly what they are proposing and where the historical “target” is, even if they find it to be a moving one. Second, though, this ends up denying the film its central premise – that of the refracted, fragmented impossibility of recovering history and finding an essential truth within an individual figure or time period. (In some ways, Polley’s film reverses the thrust of Citizen Kane: a version of Citizen Kane made by the ghost of Hearst himself.)

Polley’s direction and construction of the film as a narrative – and its insistence on making the audience aware of its constructedness – is remarkably polished. Yet, with the narrative mystery in mind, this positive polish can also be read as overly tidy. While this highlights Polley’s talents as a narrative director, it fails to accept the mysteries and the challenges of its own documentary thrust. That is, for all its talk of fragmentation and rupture, Stories We Tell is resoundingly clear, its connections are perfectly tied together; thus, its entire mode of address becomes exceedingly didactic. For all its complexities and provocative lines of questioning, Stories We Tell, if anything, left me wanting less.

***Note: This sentence has lead to some confusion and was poorly worded. Polley speaks with her actual siblings throughout the interview process. In the faux-archival footage, however, they are played by other figures (as mentioned in the previous sentences). Here, I am trying to point to this productive slippage between fact/fiction that resonates throughout the film. Actors do not play the siblings in the interviews, although I would suggest the fact that the documentation becomes skewed suggests a neat, stage-like quality to the interviews themselves in which truth/falsity can still be raised. [Thanks to Peter Labuza, Jim Gabriel, and Corey Atad for raising these points.] 

Continue reading...

Cannes (à Paris) 2013: Inside Llewyn Davis (Coen Brothers)

by James Hansen

It was a bit strange when I realized my first trip to France – occurring during the month of May – wouldn’t be for the Cannes Film Festival. Luckily for me, and Parisians, not only do Cannes films open quickly here (Only God Forgives and The Past are already in theaters), but many films that won’t open for a while have a chance to be screened via the Cannes a Paris series. Showcasing “highlights” from the festival’s official selection, there have been plenty opportunities to enjoy Cannes outside of Cannes. Alas, I don’t trust my French enough to see films without English or French subs (my reading comprehension is good-ish). As such, the Coen Brothers new film Inside Llewyn Davis, currently considered one of the frontrunners for the Palme d’Or, was an easy choice. And it wasn’t even sold out!

The soft opening of Inside Llewyn Davis suggests the Coens may be offering a different type of character than we’ve seen in their previous features. A slow ballad rings from the voice of Llewyn (a terrific Oscar Isaac), shot in a classical “unplugged” concert style. The character’s introductory emotional state bleeds through the lyrics of the song. The film immediately hits you with music and there’s a lot more of that to come. Indeed, perhaps even more than O Brother Where Art Thou?, this film, or at least its lead character, lives and breathes through the music. There is a deeply understated, affecting quality that pervades the film, providing it with some kind of backbone as it drifts with Llewyn from place to place. Other forms of music appear as cheap knockoffs, full of cliches and lacking depth. Despite Llewyn’s brashness, the Coens feel fully on his cynical side.

Nonetheless, while different than the leads of A Serious Man or Burn After Reading, Llewyn ends up as a classic Coen character – difficult, off-putting in humorous ways, self-involved, etc. Here, Llewyn’s understated back story adds interesting depths to the character’s wandering, distant nature. For a while, Llewyn’s quest feeds a tale of a man who can’t speak or interact with others as well as the loss of partnership and the toll it takes. He finds a means of communication not through conversation, but through his music, his words, his art. The music as its own kind of language leads to some of the film’s emotional sequences, but also threatens to drain it of its sly humor filled in by an array of minor characters. It fits comfortably within the world of Llewyn, but it perhaps less certainly fits within the entire world of the film. There is something caught in the middle here – much like Llewyn himself – that doesn’t feel wholly...whole. 

And, while the film is nuanced enough to work around a number of cliches, the characters and scope of the film almost too familiar. The direction of the film is sharp and sensitive, but it also never seems particularly ambitious. Llewyn’s ventures undoubtedly reflects a sensibility very much present in the Coens’ recent films – that is, life’s incredible journey as a circular, repetitive road to nowhere – but one can’t help feeling this has been treaded on in the same way before by the Coens. And maybe that is just how it goes. 

Continue reading...