David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises (2007) and Teppei Kishida's MONO: The Sky Remains The Same As Ever (2007).
(Some mild spoilers follow.)
Like Neil Marshall's The Crying Game, David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises is all about the penis. (Actually, come to think of it, so is Cronenberg's adaptation of David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly.) Or at least that's how friends, co-workers, and the non-movie critic media characterize the film, especially since the said penis is attached to one Viggo Mortensen. (Actually, come to think of it, vaginas, or substitutes thereof, play supporting roles in Videodrome, Dead Ringers, and Crash as well. Plus there's a talking anal sphincter in Naked Lunch, but that doesn't count.)
Okay, I'm just kidding about the penis. Featuring easily the best naked male wrestling scene since Larry Charles' Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, Eastern Promises is, on its surface, a fairly conventional thriller, in much the same way that Mortensen seems like a fairly conventional Russian gangster. You probably already know the story: an underused Naomi Watts stumbles upon a child prostitution ring run by the Russian Mafia after a young pregnant woman dies on her operating table. (The temptation here is to call it the structural (but not thematic) inverse of Cronenberg's A History of Violence -- same director, same lead actor -- but I won't reveal any plot spoilers. Suffice it to say that, like the Asian American Studies grad class I taught for four years or so, it's about Family and Identity.)
Critics (okay, David Denby, the only review I've read so far) have singled out the gore in Eastern Promises -- and how it simultaneously detracts from the film's seriousness, as well as confirming Cronenberg's more lurid impulses -- but I'm wondering whether that may be part of the point. What's odd about the film is that the gore doesn't seem real somehow, and I wonder, again, whether it's deliberate. There are a couple of throat slashings in Eastern Promises that look like they came right out of a Herschell Gordon Lewis film -- in other words, patently, stupidly, fake -- and then there's the eyeball-stabbing scene, which results in a rather chaste (and cinematically classic) pool of blood growing underneath the victim's body. (The way the throat cuttings are shot -- front, center, and very slowly -- don't help but foreground their artificiality.)
Contrast this with the oeuvre of another North American director who makes "serious" films but similarly traffics in gore -- see Casino, Goodfellas, The Last Temptation of Christ, Gangs of New York -- and you'll see what I mean; Scorsese clearly enjoys this stuff, and makes sure to pummel us with its nauseating realism. Compare this again with Cronenberg's earlier splatter-filled work in Videodrome, The Dead Zone, and Scanners; despite their horror / fantasy-based context, the scenes of violence in those films are excruciatingly detailed.
But more instructively, compare the odd fakery of Eastern Promises to A History of Violence, which is itself bookended by a kind of staging of the fake: the wholesomeness of Small Town America that, upon a second viewing, takes on a surreality that borders on Blue Velvet; the John Woo-stylings of the cartoonish bloodbath at the end. Eastern Promises also seems set in a London that (deliberately?) doesn't look like the moviegoer's London (but probably familiar to its residents); the fact that the film is populated by a cast and crew (Cronenberg, Mortensen, Watts, Cassel, Mueller-Stahl, Cusack) that seems like they're from pretty much everywhere *except* Russia or London -- well, I don't know where this is going. Maybe some grad student can figure this out.
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I've never been particularly taken with concert films: they inevitably pale in comparison to the experience of being at a live venue, and the cinematography usually runs the gamut from queasy oblique shots to cameras zooming in and out while sitting on tripods. Teppei Kishida's MONO: The Sky Remains The Same As Ever sidesteps the usual cliches for a largely impressionistic and immersive experience into MONO's European tour and on stage.
Instead of the usual shots of the musicians setting up their gear (or generally static shots of the lead singer, interspersed with shots of the lead guitarist as she or he goes into the solo), Kishida's fluid camera swoops unobtrusively over the proceedings, lingering over the tangles of wires on scuffed floors, the blur of the hi-hat, the top of the guitarists' heads as they hunch over their guitars. (MONO is an instrumental band, which naturally diffuses any focus on any single member of the band.) Perhaps most interesting (at least from a cinematic point of view) is the way the director pointedly includes the audience in the film during the performances: people drumming on the monitors, a couple swaying with their eyes closed -- an acknowledgment, perhaps, that they matter just as much as the music itself.
But this is all at the expense of any kind of insight into the Japanese post-rock quartet's impenetrable (or completely opaque, depending on your views) music: we vaguely hear interviewers asking questions on a voiceover track, but they aren't exactly answered. There's an inconsequential piece of footage with Steve Albini at the mixing desk, and another short scene while they rehearse with a string section, but there's nothing else about the creation of the music. The hyperbole on the MONO website doesn't exactly deliver, and maybe that's a good thing. The suitably moody, beautifully shot scenes of wintry landscapes, the sun's glare through leaves, freeways through rain-spangled windshields perhaps illustrate the emotional pull of their music best.
I realize that the words "for fans only" sounds like I'm panning the film, but it won't necessarily make a convert of the casual listener; the best way to do that is to take your friend for a drive outside of the city and put "Yearning" on really loud. In the end, the viewer gets what should have been promised in the first place: a solid and fascinatingly filmed visual souvenir of their concerts. Everything is thrillingly here: the ritualistic swaying, Taka's wall-of-sound freakouts, the 10-minute monolith of pure feedback in the middle of "Lost Snow."
Posted by the wily filipino at November 9, 2007 07:32 PM