All the Vermeers in New York

Jon Jost's filmography is quite incredible with lows and highs, but this movie and Bell Diamond (1987) is an exception. The film combines Jon Jost's signature tart wit, deadpan expressions on his characters and staccato style of dialogue with a touching romance story which can be seen in Hal Hartley films. Jon Jost makes wry comments on the class respectability for art and offers a more realistic but also a darker view on New York Stock Exchange and the society in general. The is the best amalgamation of style and substance. It moves between Hal Hartley, Michelangelo Antonioni and Eric Rohmer. The simple story of Impalpable lives illuminated and swallowed by the soft light of Vermeer's paintings is executed beautifully. I Still binge the score and striking photography of spaces, including an absolutely breathtaking whirl around an empty building lobby that's quite unlike anything I've seen. I was reminded of the music video for Flock of seagull's space age love song featuring Jennifer Connelly. Overall, this is an interesting film to look forward to for arthouse fans, but personally my expectations were well surpassed. The simple story was well played out with a lot of depth, making it look quite natural and life-like. It was also interesting to get a peep at the backstage of the world of art and stock exchange in the 80s. I certainly recommend this well made bittersweet film.

In this review I reveal why the movie is entitled "All The Vermeers In New York". I don't think knowing this spoils the film, though.

People's expectations of a film reflect a lot about them. A lot of people expect to be moved watching a film when the music swells. They expect to get excited when the shots are cut faster. This film allows you to get excited or moved about what's going on because of what is happening to the _people_, not the camera or the music. Films that cut the "crap" of "high-quality" production values and concentrate on character and story show how our ordinary lives achieve a cool, plausable if brief potentiality for soaring.

This film works on this premise, and that's why I love it. It's really a fairly wrenching story that gets told by the people, not as much by the camera and soundtrack (although the shooting and music are brilliantly understated). I identified very closely with the high-powered New York currency trader who couldn't live with himself unless he could come to the museum to gaze at the Vermeer portraits. It allows him to cross the threshold of his own limited life staring at a stock-ticker into a world of pure love, desire and ultimately, hope.

To Jost, nothing seems ordinary, unalive. He is the Van Gogh of film makers. If he made a film about pebbles in the gutter, it would be worth watching.

Jon Jost impressed me quite a bit with this. I'll definitely need to check out more of his stuff. The way he combines very formal camera-work with naturalistic, improvisational performances struck me as really great. Best of both worlds, as it were, yet the styles didn't clash at all. I found it had all the life and spontaneity of, say, a Cassavetes film, but without the kind of off-the-cuff hand-held cinematography I've come to expect from that sort of film. It reminded me more than a little of Antonioni, actually. It also managed to be very funny in a great, observational kind of way. It actually really amazes me how it captures that little spark of life, that nuance, while at the same time being visually so thought-out and impressive to look at (with lots of nice breaking of the 180-degree rule too). Unfortunately the DVD transfer I saw was not the best, so i felt like i wasn't quite getting the full experience. Also, a few slightly indulgent moments (though nothing intolerable or even much different from the more trying moments of Angelopoulos or Carlos Reygadas) left the film less than perfect, along with an ending that I felt didn't quite come off the way it should have.

It took me a while to get into the rhythm of this movie; long languorous takes with little happening, actors obviously improvising, a sense that this is a film that doesn't know what it's concerned with, but.....

Once I got into the groove of director Jon Jost was selling (once the film had taught me how to watch it), and once I got a handle on the narrative, I began to enjoy it. By the time the camera was gliding among the pillars of the Metropolitan Museum, instead of asking "what is happening?", I simply sat back and enjoyed the film's revelry in the NY art world. By then, the focus of the film has come into view; big money and its impact on things that are pure in life; love and art - and how it's bad news for all concerned.

Sounds good even to me when I describe it like that, but the film never fully works. The dispassionate nature of the framing keeps the audience at a remove, which could work but Stephen Lack as Mark is too stiff, too unreadable to ever engage the audience. I don't believe a character has to be likeable for us to engage, but we have to have a level of understanding of why they are who they are, or they need to be charismatic enough to make us want to get that understanding, but Lack can't deliver, and all of the worst scenes involve him. (And there's a random scene where the lead female characters complain to their flatmate about her singing too loud so there's competition.)

The ambition, the confidence and the technique get this film a long way, but some poor casting and the problems inherent in improvising a movie hold this back from the finish line.

I'll use a scene from the movie to illustrate my problem with it: at some point we get a tracking shot starting from a girl reading a book, across her room over various objects of interest, bedsheets, Nike shoes thrown on the floor, a Cosmopolitan, then we hear stifled sobs off screen and we track back to the girl, now crying. The camera-work is beautiful, it's the slow sensual gliding that feels like choreography for a ballet ensemble or maybe like someone's hand slipping under the hem of a skirt, but I find the points of interest it brings together and the suggestions that emerge in this linking (in Jost's cinema as a whole or at least based on what I've seen) superficial and labored.

Whereas in Frameup Jost's experimental technique got in the way of characters with a potentially interesting story waiting to be told, here I had the opposite reaction, interesting form beind sidetracked by flat uninteresting characters, possibly a story not worth the telling. The movie inhabits the lofts and galleries of Soho, the world of MoMa exhibitions and small coffee shops, its girls are sweet shy and cultured, they want to be actresses or sopranos and they care enough about the rainforest to call daddy and yell at him for bying stocks of gum companies in their name, and it's never quite clear where Jost sees himself in all this. His characters are self-involved and egopathic but his criticism against them is not as scathing (or as obvious) as in Frameup. The two male characters we see in the film are curious prototypes, the one is the angry artist throwing a temper tantrum because his agent won't lend him money, the other is the mature love interest, the stockbroker in the white horse come to sweep the young French girl off her feet.

Of course it doesn't quite work this way, and it neither does for the movie. The story takes place in New York but it's not Woody Allen's Manhattan, it's not so much about finding or losing love, romance or even alienation, as it is about obligation, about our right to not be obliged to be anything if we don't want it, not even good or loyal or in love. The movie has the feeling of walking inside an art gallery, with some of that quality quiet and alert in the same time, with something cold and irrevocable like you're sitting on a bench and you can hear the echo of someone else's footsteps reverberating from a different room (they stop and it's quiet and then you can hear them again), punctuating the story with long neat tracking shots over polished mahogany floors and in endless dervish circles around marble pillars, with symmetrical shots arranged in orderly patterns, but Jost delivers his thing with perhaps a little too much minimalism, like he's too proud and 'left-field' to dramatize properly, so that even the premise of his movie slowly begins to hide from it.

In the end Jost has to go looking for his premise. He finds it curled up in a dark corner of the museum, panting and naked, and he brings it kicking and screaming to the light. Our female protagonist begins narrating "the point of the movie" and Jost is literally speaking through her, hammering home an indifferent point in outrageous explanatory fashion, like all the subtlety of nuance that came before were but tools of their own destruction, so that we have 98% of a movie that is too vague and transparent and 2% that is anti-tank steel 5 inches thick. Maybe this is Jost the frustrated artist, who wants every last one in his audience to get him or maybe it was all an essay and he simply feels the need to conclude. From the tug-of-war between very carefully designed stylization and improv feel of acting and story, I think that Jost captures nice images, but he's not a storyteller.