Martin-259

I saw this film last night at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC. Antwerp was also shown, I believe. Peter Greenaway was there, presented comments before the film, between the films, and answered questions after the film. It started about 8PM, and when I left around 1AM, Greenaway was still answering questions. The film was shown in high definition, although the Hirshhorn projection system sometimes had trouble keeping it in focus. Antwerp repeated about twenty-five minutes of the end of Moab.

I won't attempt to describe much of the plot of Greenaway's mad project, such as I saw it, other than to say it traces the life of the title character through the two world wars of the twentieth century. If it is ever completed, one would expect there to be ninety-two "suitcases", hyperlinks as it were, to elements of Tulse Luper's life; one would expect there to be ninety-two common archetypical objects representing human existence; and one would expect there to be ninety-two characters in the movie, many of whom are introduced in split screen "auditions", which Greenaway imagined are analogous to parallel worlds. However, other than the number of times Tulse is physically assaulted, I can't recall any of the numbers going beyond thirty, so clearly there is a long way to go before the film can ever be called completed.

Greenaway described his visual metaphor as capturing elements of toolkits from multimedia computer graphics. The influence of a high bandwidth internet experience is also present. There was something analogous to a magnifier icon for creating a box around an element of a scene to be highlighted. There were panels of foreground videos playing over a background video reminiscent of a Windows Media Player or a Real Player. And there was one scene that split and adjusted the frame of the movie horizontally, like something I'd seen editing a Word document. Of course, all of these elements are subtly redefined to be nonobvious, and graphically balanced and symmetric. In one of the most visually impressive sequences in the film, the camera moves slowly from left to right, and then back, over a row of typists, each of whom has a bare light bulb above her head, and between each of them there is a semi-transparent display of rapidly changing document pages as might be scanned from a database.

Thematically, the film captures the best elements of Greenway. He said he expected Tulse Luper to be his magna opus, and the way he described the infinitely recursive structure of the story, it is likely to be an unfinished symphony. The numbers from Drowning by Numbers are here. The brutality of The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover is, too. The film is expressly referential to Greenaway's earlier works, and he suggests that Tulse Luper is his alter ego.

Greenaway makes much of the architectural elements of the frame -- the Cartesian grid, lots of horizontal and vertical lines, vanishing perspectives, conic shadows of divergent illumination from a point source -- but for me what makes Greenaway Greenaway is brutality for an underlying theme, and lots of artfully naked, sexually expressive people. The visual elements could certainly exist without the rawness, but his films would not be as powerful without it. One scene clearly showed the results of a castration, and many others involved some sort of sexual domination. Greenaway said he is an atheist; I wondered, is he also a practitioner of sexual dominance in his personal life, or is he just doing this to be interesting? Between films, Greenaway sounded almost apologetic in explaining it was about totalitarianism and anti-semitism, but it's problematic for a Britisher in our age of anti-Americanism to present so many fascist characters uttering slurs against the Jews. It's sort of like Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice talking about the Holocaust. Does repeating blood libels, like the Jews supposedly being responsible for communism, somehow perpetuate the injury? Early in the film, a character repeats a mantra to "destroy the evil" as a way presumably to end war, but then later another suggests this sounds like too much of a violent thing to do; one wonders, which is it?

This was certainly the most powerful movie experience I had in 2003, although admittedly I didn't see very many good movies this year. And the scale of Tulse Luper is such that I'm sure it will be one of Greenaway's very best, even if it never achieves a state of completion. It helps vastly of course to see it in the theater and in high definition. While Greenaway regretted the French subtitles, as the version we saw was shown at Cannes, I actually found they added another dimension to the film: not only did they help me catch what the characters were saying when they spoke too fast to hear, but the nuances of French vis-a-via English were enlightening.

In our present era, where love is a greedy algorithm (those who already have the most are the only ones who ever get more), Solondz is the best spokesman for the socially oppressed. His movies consistently make me laugh, unlike the usual "popular" Hollywood drivel. I can only hope that he doesn't sell out at least in the near future, as I'm convinced he's the next big thing. (I'm thinking what happened to Susan Seidelman and Amy Heckerling.) I noticed the little things in FAD: camera shots like something out of Godard, artistic spoofs of Magritte, Junk's Frankenstein's bride hair, Janis wearing a cheerleader jacket and eating ice cream, and the blinds that say "Always" and "Late". There is an attention to details overwhelming the flaws and showing the talent. The reality of winning and losing at love may not be changed by Solondz in our era. But he will show us its truth, and that can at least bring us hope.

Million Dollar Hotel is a beautiful movie, and one of Wenders' best recent efforts, considerably better than The End of Violence or Lisbon Story, but with a smaller worldview than Until the End of the World or Wings of Desire. The State of Things is also one of my favorite Wenders.

I can understand how many people might not like this movie. It's a young person's story about suicide and first love at the very moment when you know it's the best moment in your life as it ever will be, before you get jaded and caught up with the familiar chase after sex, money and power, when your sensations become dulled and your body not as agile because now you're older. It is concerned with poetically defective mentalities and has a drug-like sensibility to it, so you may not get it if you're a normal social conformist with a happy childhood. But then, I had this kind of youth, too, living in drug-addled international student hostel dives around Greenwich Village in the Eighties, purposefully unemployed because it seemed more open to possibility and potentiality than the unphilosophic nine to five. Suicide can really be a statement of momentary happiness rather than the mundane postmortem understanding of a troubled youth, the movie seems to say.

Jeremy Davies gives a fantastic, inspired performance, reminding me a bit of Leonardo DiCaprio in What's Eating Gilbert Grape, but much more nuanced as to require second viewings, or Johnny Depp in Benny and Joon. Admittedly, the story is not completely credible, because while the Million Dollar Hotel seems real enough (think Chelsea Hotel if it were in downtown LA), how all these misfitting characters can survive financially and end up living together in this amazing place cannot be scrupulously pondered. At the same time, it's good that Bono helped write the story, because Wenders' plots tend to be otherwise somewhat inchoate. So in the end, it's an atmospheric fantasy. (Why do so many movies of the late Nineties-early Thousands have people jumping off of roofs? : Open Your Eyes) Nor is all the acting uniform, although Davies especially, Jovavich and notably Stormare stand out. Although Gibson is focused big on the center of the video box, it's really not his movie, as he's just along for the chance to ride with Wenders. The dialogue mixed in with the Beatles lyrics is quite clever. The camera effects for those moments where Tom-Tom and Eloise seem to move in slow motion for several parts of a second are neat, as if the two of them are not completely in the same dimension of our reality and are in danger of somehow being shaken loose from this world. I can't believe this movie was never widely released, as I just found it on the shelf in the video store, don't know how I ever missed it, and I agree that it is destined to be a Wenders cult favorite.