The Stranger

If the fame of Camus' novel outstrips its quality, Visconti's film suffers from the converse. I think this film is virtually unavailable and it's a damn shame. I was lucky enough to catch a screening of a restored print and thank god none of the dialogue was dubbed in french.

This film is incredibly well shot and pulls off the remarkable feat of giving screentime to huge swaths of Camus' interior monologue. The voice over works incredibly well. Another strength is Anna Karina, she deserves more credit for this role. And a final strength is not overdoing the existentialist camera work. There's something elegant in Visconti's close-ups; consider the one of Meursault's steady hands as he flirts with smoking a cigarette beside his mother's coffin. The story is about a man's misrecognition by society; the film does an excellent job of portraying the subtle irritation this condition gives rise to.

The Antichrist

It's been several years since I've left a cinema and felt like stopping people on the street to apologize for something.

The last time this happened to me was after watching Pasolini's Salo, a film which convinced me that any kind of hunger or desire has a logical conclusion in extreme cruelty and even fascism. Lars von Trier is also really good at playing with logical extremes. The Antichrist explores two kinds of responses to the challenge of living in the aftermath of an inexpiable crime. The masculine response is rational, ordered, structured, and even cold. The feminine response is disordered, emotional, unstructured, and unpredictable. Both come up short.

The ensuing drama is terrifying, and the acting is convincing--so convincing in fact that it's easy to overlook the thin and annoying plot mechanism of the woman's failed PhD dissertation on medieval misogyny. It's the closest von Trier has ever come to extremely lazy screenwriting, but he can easily be forgiven on account of how much success he attains with his characters.

And I'm uncertain whether the ghoulish talking animals and other unsightly preternatural junk remain below von Trier or if he exalts these elements of schlock horror. Either way it is the disturbing treatment of human problems and our hastily drawn, totally inadequate solutions that makes this a great film.

Duplicity

There are two slightly-obscured agendas in this film, despite its appearance of being merely a spy film with some ingredients of slack romantic comedy. The first doesn't really interest me at all: some vague moralistic suggestion that trust must be constantly renewed in love relationships. When the dew-eyed spies confide in each other that "they aren't like other people" aren't they actually universalizing their suspicions? In other words, doesn't their game feel at some level like the normal process of guaranteeing sincerity on which all intimacy is based? Aren't they then just like other people except that they talk about this process instead of living it? The argument would then be that we all ought to realize how unreliable a testimony of love is. But what do we do? Subject this testimony to more scrutiny?

The second agenda is much more interesting but unfortunately its vehicle is the hoakiest part of the film: the provocation that shareholder-beholden corporations have inherently perverse incentives. Here the film is awesome. Misinformation and counterintelligence doesn't bother us so much in the context of warfare, ultimately the sides are drawn tidily. But in the context of corporate espionage the game seems crass, even pathetic. Intelligently, the film suggests that profit-driven corporate spies can only be played by the system they think they can outsmart. Without spoiling the plot, I think Duplicity is on to something interesting: try to leave the system by fooling it, and you get marooned.

A really good film that I thought about during Duplicity is Le Cercle Rouge - Criterion Collection

Matchpoint's Metaphysical Argument

A remarkable feature of Woody Allen's didactic Matchpoint is that its mild meta-theatrical elements draw amperage from the plot to make a loud and meaningful metaphysical remark. Nola professes to be an actor but is ostensibly deficient in skill while Chris does nothing but play parts, as member of high society, as keen cultural critic, as financier, and then most significantly as loyal husband. The result is a man whose belief in life's meaninglessness ensnares him in a dogged belief in fortune. When passion threatens this belief, the autonomous being rears its head for an act of savage violence. Faith in fate, it seems, can only be sustained at the dramatically high personal cost of defrauding oneself.

Chris's expressed fear in life is failing to make a contribution. This fear can be seen as the vehicle for the entire tragedy, for it prevents him from nobility in the time of his great decision. Far more profoundly, it is this fear which enables him to perform the spectrum of roles which comprise his existence. This tragic self-evasion makes the film something of a morality play, except in place of a principled constructivism we receive only the most befuddled nihilism. It's no wonder Woody Allen is so fond of the macabre creed from "Oedipus at Colonus" (he also used it in Deconstructing Harry)--where oh where has the nervous bard's optimism run off to?

Match Point