"The Voices": A Fun Film With Too Many Tones

Now Available on DVD and Blu-ray

Marjane Satrapi burst onto the directorial scene with a keen eye for visual flair and a sly feminist wit when she adapted her acclaimed graphic novel Persepolis to the screen as an animated feature.  She then went on to adapt her novel Chicken With Plums to the big screen with a similar degree of success.  Now we have The Voices, a truly bizarre addition to her filmography, not really dealing with any themes or motifs that fit into her comfort zone, and while this expansion into new territory certainly shows her struggle to move beyond feminist intellectualism as her go-to subject, it is still a decent enough film where I feel it deserves a recommendation.

Ryan Reynolds stars as Jerry, a pleasant enough guy who just has something a little off about him.  At his factory job, he’s friendly and upbeat, but social niceties are a little beyond him, so he comes off as weird to his coworkers.  When Jerry goes home, he talks to his pet dog and cat… and they talk right back.  Jerry suffers from some form of mental illness (a vague form of schizophrenia that is never fully diagnosed) wherein his dog acts as his conscience and his cat as his psychotic murderous id.  Through interacting with his animal “friends,” Jerry navigates the treacherous world of dating, accidental killing, intentional killing, and sexual intimacy.

Satrapi plays to her strengths right off the bat by casting the sets and characters in a darkly comic tone, with bright scenery and perpetually polite characters populating the screen as the undercurrent of Jerry’s approaching breakdown looms just below the surface.  Reynolds is actually a surprisingly good fit for the role, shedding his normal frat douche persona for a more innocent and confused man who doesn’t know how to handle his loneliness.  The film really shines when Jerry decides to stop taking his meds, and the wool is pulled from both his and the audience’s eyes as we see that his existence isn’t so bright and cheery as we would believe.

Alas, that is also the film’s biggest stumbling block, as it fumbles between wildly contrasting tones at the behest of the plot.  The film starts as a dark comedy, and remains as such for a good long while, but soon we start to get glimpses of Jerry’s past and a scene shot from the perspective of one of his potential murder victims, and suddenly the laughs come to a complete stop.  It is rather jarring to spend one scene talking with a disembodied head in a comically overblown accent, then another seriously dwelling on child abuse and suicide as side effects of mental illness.  The scenes are handled well to convey the tones that they are intended for, but the tones are so wildly discordant that they don’t feel like they belong in the same film.

And yet, despite this issue, I had a good time with The Voices.  Though definitely not the smartest work in Marjane Satrapi’s portfolio, it remains consistently funny when it’s trying to be, and the self-serious diversions aren’t so much film-breaking as they are distracting.  For fans of dark humor, I say give this one a shot, and hope that Satrapi can continue making great work after learning from her mistakes.

What do you think of Satrapi’s past work?  Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

"Goodbye To Language": A Confounding Art Piece

Now Available on 2D DVD and 3D Blu-ray

So, this review is going to require some disclosure.  I do not enjoy 3D movies.  Never have, likely never will.  My eyes do not register the effect very well, and the consequential blurring and discoloration that is often a by-product of the 3D rendering process tends to pull me out of the experience rather than immerse me.  So, it is very well possible, if not probable, that by watching Goodbye To Language in 2D, rather than the 3D for which it was filmed, I have deprived myself of the substantial purpose of the film.  Furthermore, I do not generally watch art films.  I tend to prefer narrative pieces, which is why I generally stick to films reasonably likely to be known by my audience.  However, May is shaping up to be a slow month for notable home video releases, so I thought I would try my hand at something different.

Being that this is an art film, it will most certainly not be for everyone.  Between the experimental shifts in coloring to the seemingly arbitrary dialogue and voiceover (all appropriately enough in French), many a viewer is sure to be baffled by an hour with no readily apparent purpose.  Goodbye To Language is best classified as an audio-visual experience rather than a traditional narrative motion picture, and like all art, what you take away from it will be completely unique to you.

The film is comprised of two interchanging parts: “Nature” and “Metaphor.”  “Nature” is paradoxically set primarily in urban locales, cars, or in a person’s home, and dialogue philosophizes over visual chaos.  My takeaway from these portions was that as language evolves, it becomes harder and harder for us to understand one another, because language is no longer about communication but individual expression.  “Metaphor,” on the other hand, primarily focuses on a dog wandering through the woods with observational voiceover as accompaniment.  I took these portions to be representative of there not being a need to communicate at a base natural level.  Now, my interpretations may not be the understood norm of what this art piece is supposed to represent, but given my usual avoidance of art without structure, this is the best I can come up with.

Director Jean-Luc Godard is best known for founding the French New Wave film movement in the 1960s, which tends to abandon character, story, and form in favor of experimentation with film as a medium.  That is precisely what he has done here, though as a two-dimensional experience it is hard to judge it as anything revolutionary.  New Wave techniques have worked their way into popular cinema over the decades, so perhaps the 3D experiments Godard performed here will make their way into our annual blockbusters.  I don’t rightly know, and I likely never will, given my distaste for this particular experiment.  So is Goodbye To Language a good film?  I’m not sure I can give a definitive answer.  I don’t regret the hour I spent with it, but I don’t think I could recommend the film with any enthusiasm either.  Ultimately, it comes down to whether you think yourself a person who would enjoy abandoning narrative fiction for an hour to simply experience something.  And only you can answer that question.

Have any experience with art cinema?  Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

"Winter Sleep": Textually Brilliant, Exhaustively Long

Now Available on DVD and Blu-ray

One of the potential dangers of independent cinema is that a lack of producer input can lead to an inferior product.  Winter Sleep is such a film to demonstrate that issue; it is by no means a bad film, and it is actually a rather brilliant character study of its protagonist.  However, the film has a runtime of over three hours, with many scenes running for excessively long periods that grind the narrative to a screeching halt.

Taking place in a Turkish village (and with dialogue entirely in Turkish), Winter Sleep is the story of Aydin, a former actor and current hotel owner, as well as landlord over a substantial portion of the village.  His time is devoted mostly to researching for a book he wishes to write about Turkish theater and writing columns for the local paper.  He is a wealthy and educated man, but leaves the handling of his affairs to an assistant and a team of lawyers.  One day, while driving with his assistant, a young boy throws a rock at Aydin’s window, which we later find out is in retaliation against Aydin’s legal team hiring debt collectors to claim property to pay for months of unpaid rent.  The boy’s uncle is the local imam, and tries to get Aydin to see charity in assisting a family that is down on their luck and in need of leniency in paying their rent.

The truly remarkable thing about Aydin is that he is a creature of self-delusion and contradiction, sitting aloft in an ivory tower that is admittedly of his own devise, yet feels no need to personally address the concerns of his tenants or the well-being of his fellow man.  In fact, behind his general niceties and lofty speeches of idealized community and morality, Aydin is an extremely selfish and egotistical person, claiming that any sort of financial leniency he could offer is out of his hands, even though he is the one in charge, ultimately benefits most from rent collection, and has already amassed considerable wealth.  In essence, Aydin is the pure embodiment of libertarianism, yet is not committed enough to the idea of self-realization to admit that he operates in a self-imposed isolation.

And yet, despite this brilliant character study, it gets lost in the fact that the film itself is just exhausting.  The first and third hours are handled just fine, with decent pacing and enough narrative twists to almost work as a film entirely on their own.  The middle third, however, feels unnecessarily protracted, almost entirely consumed by two extremely long scenes wherein Aydin speaks with his sister and his wife, both of whom spend more than twenty minutes conversing about how Aydin is a hypocrite and a narcissist.  Not only are these scenes overlong and, with the exception of one or two key plot points, completely unnecessary, they are also incredibly blunt, laying out in synoptic form the entire thesis on Aydin’s personality.  The film is not so subtle that these dialogues are needed to explain the thematic nuances, and they stretch the film to almost unbearable lengths.

However, I do think Winter Sleep is worth recommending.  After the first protracted conversation, which ends at roughly the halfway point, I would recommend taking a break and coming back to see the second half, just for the sake of allowing your brain to absorb everything that has happened up to that point.  This is a film that would have been much better with tighter construction and more editing, but as is, it is an engrossing character study and well worth watching… just not in one sitting.

What overlong films do you think could have stood to be edited down?  Leave your thoughts in the comments below.