Eros

I rather enjoy watching short films. Like short stories, there's seldom room for more than one good idea, so that idea has to be done well--in the hands of a skilled director, this is an opportunity rather than a limitation. Eros is a collection of three such films, ostensibly sharing a similar theme.

Wong Kar Wai's "The Hand" is the first film, and is a premiere example of what a short film can achieve. A concise story about a tailor and a high class prostitute, "The Hand" distills the love/lust theme into a beautiful, intoxicating gem. It is by far the best film of the bunch, perhaps even one of the director's finest.

Steven Soderbergh's "Equilibrium" is the second film in the trio, and features a few shots of a naked woman and a long and unrelated dialog between Robert Downey Jr and Alan Arkin. As far as I can tell the film has vanishing little to do with love, lust, passion or sex--and not much else to say about anything. Soderbergh, who's often hit-or-miss, misses big time with this convoluted short.

Michelangelo Antonioni's "Dangerous thread" (or however it is properly translated) is quite different from the previous two films. It is certainly on message, featuring lots of full frontal nudity and some sex, but doesn't really have much of a story. It actually feels like it is much closer to succeeding than "Equilibrium", if only because it seems to fit comfortably within its time constraints, but the vacuous plot leaves you bored.

In the end Eros is a missed opportunity. After the first film you expect a beautiful tapestry of ideas and perspectives, but it never materializes. Nevertheless, the first film is well worth watching--easily justifying a rental or screening.

One part brilliant, one part so-so, one part utter crap. Guess which one is which. OK, I'll help you out. In the order of appearance:

"The Hand" by Wong Kar-Wai is a solid piece of film-making, but nothing special. Let's just say the Master does not break any new ground with yet another short story of unrequited love. We've seen these characters before, they are not that interesting, and the story itself veers too far into melodramatic to my liking.

"Equilibrium" by Soderbergh is a witty, clever little nugget... and you won't soon forget an unorthodox shrink who indulges in a bit of voyerism on the side while treating his twitchy patient (a great appearance by Robert Downey Jr.)

The Whatever It Was Called by Antonioni is so bad, I could not believe my eyes. Well, unless you enjoy watching gorgeous girls writhing on a bed or dancing on the beach - naked. Oh, you think quite a few people would enjoy that? So did Antonioni. The whole thing looked like an extended male fantasy of a Maserati commercial. No characters or plot, not particularly interesting cinematography...It was just boring.

Bottom line, it was a strange idea to bring together three allegedly great directors on a single ticket, and it did not pay off. Go see it for the Soderbergh piece if nothing else. Wong Kar-Wai fans will be slightly disappointed, and Antonioni fans are beyond salvation.

I saw this movie at the Toronto Film Festival, on the suggestion of friends who were very excited about Wong Kar Wai's short in particular. I had never seen anything by that director, but I was interested enough in the concept of the movie (three short films by three directors of different nationality) to go along.

The first short, Wong's 'The Hand', is excellent; it is touching and powerful. The acting is so good that the sub-titles are barely necessary; the emotion in their voices conveys meaning in itself. I enjoyed this enough to want to see more of the director's work.

The second is Steven Soderbergh's 'Equilibrium', and it's the sort of film that I sometimes think the West has forgotten how to make. It's a funny, fast-paced bit of banter between two excellent actors (Alan Arkin and Robert Downey Jr.), both of whose professional lives are thrown off balance by women. Also, despite its short running time,it manages to stick in a number of amusing plot twists.

Which brings us to the third short, Michaelangelo Antonini's 'The Dangerous Thread of Things'. As my friend put it: "Like so many directors, he got old and he got horny". This is a shocking combination of bad acting, pointless storytelling, and unnecessary nudity...and this is not just my opinion; by about halfway through, most of the audience was laughing with embarrassment and more than a few were leaving the theatre.

So, in conclusion, Eros is a film of contrasts: two excellent pieces of cinema and one piece of garbage. If you like the work of Wong or Soderbergh, I highly recommend this film. If you are an Antonini fan, stay away...it'll just upset you.

This is one of the most encompassing films I have seen in a while. Not because we have a chance to savor at once three masters at work, no. Opinions of their mastery will differ after all.

It matters because we have three master fiddlers on the same stage, liberated from the pressure of exerting control over the logistics of an entire project, so each one can singularly shape his present moment from his corner of the stage, a small rhythm, trusting the others to compliment and intone. So even though each segment is structured within itself and harmonical, the whole echoes with the assymetry of spontaneous creation. Wonderful.

So three shorts about eros; albeit not erotic in the sense perhaps inferred by the title, not strictly sensual, rather about the desire to see in that space where the senses come into being. All three are highly architectural essays about that space. All three are about some ineffable palpitation of the heart growing fonder, beating faster. All three improvise transcendence.

The structure of the thing we can attribute to our conventional film culture that always waxes vaguely about the abstract (Antonioni), treats narrative engineering as a subject of dry, academic discourse (Soderbergh), and is generally more comfortable to evaluate memories of beauty and touch (Wong Kar Wai).

I am going to write about these last to first, which is also how they resonated with me.

• The last segment is typical Kar Wai/Doyle fashion, unfolding down the corner from In the Mood for Love; so flowery, arrested breathing, quietly exasperated romance with the musky scents of intimacy in close quarters. Of course Mood only blossomed in hindsight of 2046, and there is no chance for that here. So we get a simple beauty about a simple yearning; a young tailor falls for an elegant woman, both strangers. He measures love for her as the silky fabrics he creates to encase her. She constantly eludes him. All that is finally left is a moment suspended in time. It's okay but the least here for my taste, a matter of some poetry.

• Soderbergh for the middle part. Free from the eyes of Hollywood money-men, he creates what he does best and has repeatedly nested in his more famous stuff; New Wave from the gaps of multiple planes of seeing. A man is recounting to his psychiatrist a recurring dream about a woman, who unseen by his patient all this time keeps looking out the window with a pair of binoculars. The whole thing is set in the 50's and aptly recalls film noir as a shorthand, there are venetian blinds, hats, shadows. Most importantly noirish, a double perspective looking to apprehend the controls of nightmare (or dream as in our case).

The update, a French touch: a third layer at the last moment, the base layer of reality last. Piled on that we have the dream about the woman, purely sensual blues, and the mind inbetween, the Rear Window vignette with the psychiatrist, seeking the mechanisms that control these images. He finds inspiration in the dream to apply in real life, a new motto for an alarm clock, and comes to realize who is the elusive woman. Wonderful, structured stuff.

• Finally going backwards we have Antonioni on his last work, the one master two or three notches above the rest and again wildly misunderstood. Several viewers have commented that his segment is little more than the sexual fantasies of a dirty old man. What narrow-minded bunk. What poor reading skills. To even think that Antonioni would have to grow to be 90 to peek at pert nipples. Oh, there is a shot of a woman standing up on a bed fondling her privates, and more nudity; but it's a fantasy only if you completely miss the shot immediately after that posits the whole structure of the house as this woman of mysterious architecture.

No, what we have here is another contemplation on the cessation of self from Antonioni's large contemplative tradition.

You may have noticed that he all but disappeared after The Passenger. There was the stroke and all that. But beyond that, there was nowhere left to go. He had achieved the utmost that film can aspire to be to my mind; sensing in the present purely with the eye, a full awareness of the world as it comes into being and vanishes again. There is nothing more.

So for his part, he films one last time for old time's sake. He takes us on a reminiscing tour of earlier films as though saying goodbye to the whole thing soon to vanish; a couple wandering the ruins of an affair breaking down (L'Avventura, La Notte), youth bathing naked between rocks (Zabriskie Point), the towering old house (a monastery in L'Avventura, where bells were rung), the sense of a concave reality (Blowup).

So the man takes off to explore this other woman, new sex with her that could rejuvenate a life of exasperation. Of course simply pursuing blind new desire is not the answer, so he disappears from the film. The two women meet on an empty stretch of beach.

Antonioni being the wisest of the three, is the only one who leaves us with something tangible to attain. Film doesn't have to be highly complex to be insightful. It can be a simple passage, no more than a woman dancing naked on a beach. The parting shot sums an entire life in movies, a sage's life. The two women standing next to each other, a little apart, not touching, but aware in each other's presence and their shadows connect. It's the most sublime last shot any filmmaker graced us with.

-Kar Wai, segment The Hand: 5/10. -Soderbergh, segment Equilibrium: 8/10. -Antonioni, segment The Dangerous Thread of Things: 10/10

What a treat! A film school in 104 minutes!

Forget what the detractors say about this. Most seem to think that none of it is erotic enough and few "like" the Soderbergh and Antonioni projects.

But you, dear viewer, you will know this as three explorations into how the eye creates the seductive impulse. And we have three masters, though I wish we also had Greenaway and Medem involved.

I assume that these three did not collaborate in any way. I also assume that the sponsors did not specify that the projects be erotic, rather that they explore what it means to be erotically engaged.

The first we see is by Kar-Wai Wong. His object of desire is Gong Li, who at 40 is still beautiful. She plays a prostitute who conspires to replace her old dressmaker with a young man. (The subtitles call him a tailor, to emphasize the tale that he spins.)

She engages his desire-driven imagination, which binds him to her and brings out his very best in terms of the dresses he creates. She weaves him and through the clothes, he weaves her. Toward the end, the image is polished with her ill and out of favor, and he still as obsessed and caressing a dress he made, moving his entranced hand inside it. It is his hand the title denotes.

At the very end, he tells a tale to his boss of his woman as back in the money, now fully his creation.

The second entry is amazing. Soderbergh is often capable of creating plots with circular reference. And since the very beginning, this notion of one reality creating another has been at his center. But this outdoes even "Full Frontal."

We have three dreams. One is the one we see first, a gauzy look through windows at an amazingly engaging scene: a beautiful redhead bathing and dressing. The dream starts as voyeurism through windows, but as is described later, our voyeur enters the dream as a participant. In the dream, he is on the bed dreaming.

Shift to a psychiatrist's office, where we meet the dreamer, played by Downey, one of our few folded actors. He is a clock designer obsessed with this dream. Over time, he is enticed to lay down and segue from talking about the dream to actually enter the dream. During this time, the psychiatrist begins his own voyeurism out the window.

Most reviewers saw this and thought the comic indifference was the point. Oh my. Their license to view films should be revoked.

As Downey dreams, we enter the third world, the third dream. He pulls a trigger suggested in the earlier segment and wakes into the dream where he is now married to his desire, and he goes to clock-designer work where his assistant is the same guy as the analyst, except he is the one obviously insecure.

All three worlds are set in the 50s. Which is the dream? Which is the source of pulling the desire into reality? Are dreams of desire cinematic or the other way around? Which of the paper airplanes connect?

The third project is widely dismissed as the obsessive sexual impetulance of an old, fading man.

The scene here is simple. A husband and wife have a spat. She is topless at first then puts on a transparent top as they go to a restaurant. There they briefly encounter another inhabitant of the beach resort where this is set. He visits this woman and they seduce each other, apparently a single event.

Later, the husband and wife are reconciled. Both woman happen to be nude on the beach, both seemingly in a sensual plateau. They encounter each other; more precisely the wife encounters the other asleep, casts a shadow on her while she stirs. They stare at each other silently. Neither, incidentally, is particularly attractive.

When the man and his affair begin, he has entered the "other" tower on the beach, after she wonders if he can stand her chaos, absolute chaos. Viewers seem to equate this with his famed trilogy about love from the sixties. Those were dumb films.

How could they forget "Blowup," an essay on how cinematic memory bends or even defines reality. And how he stretched that into wonderful folded space in "Beyond the Clouds."

You have to do some work here. You have to know that this is not about sex, or the erotic figure. Nor even anything at all having to do with examining a relationship. It is all about how perception defines the situation, moved erotically.

Guess no one want to do the work. But if you are interested in film, you'll want to view these three notions of where the eye of love sits. With Wong, it is in the present, Soderbergh in the remembered and Antonioni the expected.

I prefer Wong's world so far as experience. He even takes it as far as not having a script, but making up the movie as he shoots. Love should ideally be erotic, and the invention of that world should be one you coweave with your partner, dressing each other into the miracle.

But these other fellows have hypnotic appeal as well.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.