The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 1: The Moab Story (Greenaway, UK): C

This Peter Greenaway work is incomplete. That may be because I have only seen Part 1: The Moab Story and there being two other filmic parts, but really the whole project is incomplete. To boil the essence of the work down it a sentence, the Tulse Luper Suitcases is a biographical, hyper-textual, encyclopedic story of a fictional man. Greenaway explores the life of Luper through a myriad of sources, from text to photographs, old footage, reconstructions, dramatizations, faux-historical accounts, hearsay, music, and so on and so forth. In the films the director digitally combines many of these elements and presents them to the viewer, often several important sources at the same time: a staged recreation in the middle ground, archival historical footage projected in the background, the script of the scene overlaid as a subtitle, and a screen-in-screen box offering running commentary. The sheer amount of information delivered—both its oblique references and its recognizable ones—fragmented by the plethora (and varying importance) of media types, seems impossible to keep up with. And taking into account the rich and detailed, and by no means extraneous, information provided at the film’s website, as well as the proposed continuation of the story via television and dvd releases from the director, the project seems ever in the process of its own unending creation.

That, in the end, is the best thing about The Tulse Luper Suitcases, as Greenaway seems less invested in the story he has created for Luper, an eccentric “writer” whose enormous output of scribblings and half-finished almost-great ideas leads him around the world and labels him a spy during the onset of World War 2, than in the tangential information connected to him. The suitcases (all 92 of them) embody this notion the best, existing as emblems of Luper’s desire (read, Greenaways’) to categorize all things under one system (though even the project’s unintegrated, cross-media aspect immediately denies this ability). Therefore it is not so much Luper’s odd life that is of import, but rather his existence as a vector point for an endless amount of interesting and arcane trivia. Off-beat characters, little known “historical” incidents, flashes of wit, of humor, of politics, of horror, of art, and of sex all are somehow connected to Luper, in what feels like an ever-expanding circle of encyclopedic encompassment.

The interest, then, in The Tulse Luper Suitcases (or at least this first series of them) lies in precisely how much of the information Greenaway manipulates into touching Luper’s life (including, in a hilarious gesture, many of Greenaway’s own films) a viewer finds engrossing. Of course, the ever-active digital montage technique of the director and Borut Krzisnik’s fairly amazing musical score never allow the work to grow dull visually or aurally, but frankly none of the characters register as remarkable beyond their conception (such as a Mormon family from Utah who joins the American Fascist Party) and Luper’s story itself skips around too much to give the film any narrative gratification. Artistic flourishes (such as the geometric shape made by connecting the individual points on screen where a character what punched during a beating) and trails of information, for this viewer, were more often than not fairly interesting, but so far the work has not moved beyond being a multimedia project of great potential but only scattered importance.

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2046 (Wong, Hong Kong): B-

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The Ninth Day (Schlöndorff, Germany): D

The Ninth Day is such a banal, unprovoking look at faith under Nazi oppression that it comes as a shock that this is a work by veteran German director Volker Schlöndorff. The dramatic idea—a cross between Costa-Gavras’ Amen which told of a German officer attempting to inform the Catholic Church about Nazi atrocities, and Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc which depicted the transcendence of a human ardently keeping to her faith—is that an influential priest from Luxembourg (Ulrich Matthes) is temporarily released from the Dachau concentration camp in order to be blackmailed into writing a letter of support for the Nazi regime. The priest’s doppelganger is a young Christian Gestapo man (August Diehl) who threatens the imprisonment of the priest’s family and the execution of all of Luxembourg’s clergy if the priest tries to flee, and re-imprisonment in Dachau if he will not form a bridge between the Vatican and the Reich.

For a two-character chamber drama the drama is seriously lacking. Schlöndorff’s only formal steps taken to portray the priest’s crisis of conscious and faith is deadening the color of Luxembourg so that it resembles not a relief from the camps but a grim tomb bereft of life. This aesthetic decision sadly also kills off the outside world, making it seem like the uncomfortable political limbo of Luxembourg during the war exists only as a test for the priest, a purgatory inbetween pre-war, faith-filled life and the horrors of Dachau. Barely anyone not involved in tormenting the priest is absent from the screen, as if the rest of the society were hushed behind closed doors waiting for the result of the singular struggle. Leaving the drama up to the actors would be permitted if the script, written by Eberhard Görner and Andreas Pflüger from the real-life diary of the priest, was as sharp and combative in words as, for example, Dreyer’s film is in visuals. Instead, Schlöndorff lets the aesthetics of the actors speak for the film in its entirely. At first this seems not like a bad decision, as Matthes’ visage seems gaunt and haunted in a way suggesting not only that Dachau has physically withered his body but that this is a man with such a perceptive moral sense that everything around him seems to weigh on his psyche as a crisis of faith, and the strain visibly has altered his face. The superficial, but never the less extremely interesting intertextual point that Matthes had most recently played Dr. Joseph Goebbles in Downfall ironically brings a unique tension into a film that is supremely lacking in its depiction of a personal crisis. Diehl is not so lucky, playing the plucky, young, intellectual Nazi so common to cinema, and the fact that neither actor really is able to take a bite out of the other (as each character seems to have something else on their mind, the script doesn’t truly evoke what and Schlöndorff does not offer any subtly of psychology) is a failure of the script and the direction, not of the situation.

Taking place in such a real setting—as opposed to the abstract historical setting of Passion of Joan of Arc—it seems like above all else the priest’s moral conflict should be an allegory for all collaborators and potential collaborators, who have to individually weigh the worth of what they want to protect with the grander things they believe in and stand for(be it religion, national, or social). With the confrontation between the Catholic priest and the fervant Nazi being utterly timid in words and action such an allegory seems the only means of appreciating this film. But The Ninth Day never offers such an allegory; its ambitions are humble but this humbleness, when compounded by the film’s dramatic timidity and pathetic use of conventional filmmaking, make the ambitions of the film not just humble but low and cowardly.

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4 (Khrjanovsky, Russia): D

4 would make a really terrific 80-minute film. Starting with perhaps the most striking and promising opening shot in recent memory—four dogs lay anxiously on an empty city street at night, a mysterious pumping machine churning in the background; suddenly the dogs take flight, shrieking in fear as four spider-like mechanic legs descend into frame and start pounding the pavement—the film initially seems to pack considerable conceptual wallop. The lives of three strangers intersect at a bar late one night where all three tell attractive lies to the others. One (Yuri Laguta), in real life a seller of dead meat, claims to be in charge of distributing water to the presidential administration. The sole woman (Marina Vovchenko) says she is a model who sells a new Japanese machine that churns out waves that make people more productive, when in fact she really is a call girl. The story of the other man (Sergei Shnurov) is the most intriguing, spinning a long tale about Russian genetic engineering experiments starting back in the 1930s. He claims that the Russian labs perfected human cloning by a method which creates four “doubles” of a person, and that not only are there grown-up clones living all around Russia, there are whole slums filled with them and towns devoted to keeping those rendered sick and infirmed by the experiments.

Thus starts 4, a film that takes a curious, intriguing route of looking at identity and the quest for finding meaning in modern life. Potentially fascinating, highly abstruse parallels are tracked at an initially confounding rate—the film’s obsession with meat, a father’s obsession with routine and neatness, the constant presence of dogs in the compositions either as place-fillers for the humans or as menacing predators—though many of the visual jabs at the influence of industry on modern life fall flat. At the point when the film essentially jettisons the two men from its episodic narrative and latches onto the girl is when 4 seems ripe to conceptually explode. The girl, it turns out, is one of a set of quadruplets, and she journeys into the wilderness in the most tedious of extended sequences to attend the funeral of one of her sisters. At the funereal she finds not only her identical sisters but a village full only of old women who make human-looking dolls out of stuffing and chewed up bread. The doll’s organic faces—each one made unique with a “secret” by the now deceased sister—bring the film’s oblique meditation on human existence briefly into startling, disturbing clarity. But then director Ilya Khrjanovsky decides to spend the next hour extending this sequence of mourning, doll-making, and observing the grotesque festivities of these isolated, drunken old ladies, most tragically leaving behind the girl as a character (not to mention the two men from the film’s beginning, who are only sporadically seen) and now merely an arbitrary presence in the abstract emotional outpouring coursing in the village. Occasionally Khrjanovsky will produce a brilliant, provocative parallel cut, say between the man’s inspection of a meat warehouse and with the obscene, confusing identity crisis going on at the female village—but the moments are rare. The acrid, wonderfully expansive and detailed sound design remains the only consistent positive aspect to the film. 4 plods along at a dreary, repetitive pace, the director’s snippy concepts, like the dolls, are strung along and drawn out until they not only seem to have no meaning but are wearisome as the film refuses to move on and develop its ideas. In its over-generous editing this debut film goes from unsettlingly brilliant to numbingly, extendedly perplexing.

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Singing Behind Screens (Olmi, Italy): C

A naïve, innocent young man is accidentally led into a Chinese brothel and entertained not by sex but by a performance of a legendary pirate story in Ermanno Olmi’s Singing Behind Screens. The performance starts out as a mix of narration—by a ship captain played by Bud Spencer—and dance, all performed on a theatre stage made to look like a Chinese pirate ship. As the young man reluctantly accepts the drugged offerings of the brothel the theatrical performance of the pirate story slips into a cinematic dream. The legend—adapted by Olmi from a story by Borges who himself acquired the tale from somewhere else—tells of the lover (Ichikawa Jun) of a famed Chinese pirate rising to fame after the pirate is killed by his double-crossing “legitimate” financiers. Like the best fairy tales, that of the pirate-tess is simple and parable-like, weaving a brief story of vengeance, social and sexual rebellion, and finally a spiritual understanding and a desire for forgiveness. While the combination of Fabio Olmi’s exquisite photography and the very impressive costumes and pirate ships enthusiastically set the stage for an adventurous cinematic rendering of the story, the director will have no such thing. With surprising deftness Olmi takes his fairy tale from operatic heights (helped especially by Han Yong’s score) to tongue-in-cheek humor, but mixes the whole enterprise with postmodern, multi-layered reflexivity and moments of art-house stylized seriousness that seem at once earnest and a pastiche. The film’s initially compelling structure makes it seem like Olmi will jump between the on-location cinematic re-telling, the stage-bound version, and the impressions of the young man, but the film gradually decides to spend most of its time with the water-bound pirate crew. The time spent with them unfortunately highlights the filmmaker’s refusal to flesh out his characters or expand his story into something more than a spindly act-structured plot.

The principal string that connects everything in the film is the multiple ways of representing Borges’ pirate story. Of main concern are the modes of representation of the legend that weave in and out of each other in Singing Behind Screens (film, literature, music, song, dance, and even language as most of the Asian actors are noticeably dubbed into Italian) and the themes or “point” of the legend itself (which range from being a proto-feminist text, a story about love, longing and letting go, a piece about social inequality, political power and political motivation, and even a moralist story). But the characters are merely narrative stand-ins, and the favored cinematic version is more a series of cause-and-effect retellings than a sweeping story featuring legendary characters. The stage sequences flirt more with experimental representations of historical characters and social and political forces, but Olmi favors the superficial spectacle beauty of his film’s lovely rendering of mediterranean locations as Chinese coastal waters. The photography may look nice, the large pirate junks quite stunning amidst the hilly, barren coasts, but the people on the boats are lifeless and so is any emotion or motivation coming from them. In the end it is the film’s inability to make the actual Chinese legend itself live on as something more than a colorless play-by-play of a pirate’s rise and fall that makes one question the very idea of wanting to represent such an unremarkable story.

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Towards Mathilde (Denis, France): C-

It isn’t about preparation for the performances, it isn’t about the slow realization of the concept, and it certainly isn’t about dance choreographer Mathilde Monnier either as a person or an artist. So what is Claire Denis’ film Towards Mathilde about? Well, it seems to be about movement, and if that sounds too general for you that is probably why the film, on the whole, doesn’t work. Denis, working with both Super-8 and Super-16 cameras, does not put much effort into structuring her film beyond linking visual sections, and the result is a random-seeming mix of Monnier warming up, directing, and practicing performances herself, a few behind-the-scenes looks at creating stage design, as well as several rather remarkable practice performances by Monnier’s dancers. Three different productions are caught in various stages in the film so any hope of finding a unity in the work comes at the commonality between them, that is, the choreography of Mathilde Monnier. While the name of the film implies that the dancers, the filmmaker, and eventually the audience will gradually move to understanding or seeing the vision of the famous choreographer, Denis’ expanding reliance on ellipses here works against forming a concrete picture of whatever this film is about. Some of the most interesting segments are when Denis takes her camera into the middle of a performance for a tight shot that eliminates the big picture of the dance while at the same time somehow integrating the camerawork into the dance itself. Other times she remains removed to observe the dance from a static position that affords a better appreciation of spontaneous conceptual grace. Often stunning moments of graceful dancer ingenuity or unexpectedly successful conceptual ideas are captured here and there, but scenes are never brought together to mean something other than briefly exploring impressions of movement. In this way isolated segments of the film can be enjoyable if not downright moving, but placed end on end the totality of the work leaves little impression about Mathilde as a dancer and creator, or dance in general as an art of movement.

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