The Reader

I saw The Reader last night and was sadly, unimpressed. Maybe it’s my Cassavetes obsession or my love for the kind of adhoc aesthetic of the Maysles brothers, but I couldn’t help feeling disappointed by the Hollywood conventional-ness of it all.

Adapted from Bernard Schlink’s excellent novel, the story follows a teenage boy’s sexual awakening and subsequent discovery of his older lover’s Nazi past. Michael (David Kross) meets Hanna (Kate Winslet) when he throws up outside her house one afternoon. She takes him home (he has scarlet fever) and once he is better the two embark on an affair.  Hanna likes being read to, and the two spend a lovely summer of books and sex, after which Hanna disappears. After the affair, Michael goes around steeped in a Goethe-like melancholy. As the adult Michael Ralph Fiennes does a sterling job of this – he even somehow looks German, a trick which Kate Winslet never manages, despite her floral dresses and sturdy sandals. Years later, Michael attends the trial of some Nazi guards as part of his University studies. Hanna is one of the women being tried, and despite the fact it could affect the outcome of her sentence, she refuses to reveal her illiteracy. She is found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. After some years, Michael begins to send her tapes of the books he read to her the summer of the affair, and slowly, she learns to read.

Schlink’s book is full of powerful imagery, and considering Germany’s rich cinematic history it seems almost wasteful to have the film made by an Englishman whose contributions (despite his repeated Oscar nominations) to cinema have been solid at best. ‘Solid’ is a good way to describe The Reader. Shot with pleasant lighting, a blue-grey colour palette, bland mise-en-scene, and driven along by a manipulative syrup of a score, the fact that it is a ‘good’ movie is perhaps its worst flaw. I was simply underwhelmed by the blandness of it all. Wim Wenders writes that there are films that open your eyes and films that gummy them up, noting that the best films make you think differently, while the rest reinforce a kind of status quo.

The Reader is one of the latter, when it ought to be one of the former. Schlink’s story explores the moral and emotional ambiguities of post Nazi Germany, but the film never really gives us a good idea of the climate in which it’s set. The characters ask, ‘Given the circumstances of our lives, how do we best live?’ Questions of complicity, guilt, shame and responsibility are twisted together like a Celtic love-knot, but the film waters all this turgid emotion into one and a half hours of flaccid drivel. It plays to the audience in the crudest cinematic way, and while it works on this level – the two lovely women on either side of me were in tears – I’d forgotten it by the time I got home.

True Blood

There has been a lot of vampire hype around lately, what with Twilight, True Blood, and now the Swedish teen fang flick, Let The Right One In.  Over the Christmas holidays I was finally able to watch the whole first season of True Blood, and I am addicted.  Addicted in the I-can’t-stop-thinking-about-it-three-months-later-and-even-Mad Men-can’t-distract-me-from-hanging-out-for-the-second-season way.  Last week at the supermarket I saw a bottle of dark red juice and was struck by a restless desire to skull the thick sticky stuff and float off into a hallucinatory heaven.  Cadillac is also smitten, and what male of the Bruno Kirby variety wouldn’t be when Anna Paquin saunters through each episode in a variety of short shorts and little white singlets.  Phwoar!  To top things off, she is a psychic of sorts, able to listen in to the thoughts of the people around her.  What more could anyone want?

 

There is blood, sex and supernatural goings on in abundance, but the absolute best thing about True Blood is the credit sequence.  With Jace Everrett’s Bad Things setting up the rhythms, a rattlesnake rears its head, a child smears berry around his mouth, a gospel choir rouses a soul, and a dog’s carcass decays before our eyes.  It’s a heady mix of sensation and contradiction, evoking a place where emotions are amplified and chaos is the order of the day.

The sequence was put together by Digital Kitchen, and opens with a tracking shot across the Mississippi, through the reeds and trees, down a wire lined highway and into the fickle heart of southern America.  Historical stock footage is cut together with images Alan Ball and Matt Mulder filmed on super eight cameras on a road trip around Louisiana.  This mix of the old and new works to create a mood – a shot of a young boy in Klu Klux Klan headgear is followed by a man rocking in a chair in a strange juxtaposition that gives the image of the man a sinister edge.  Momentary shots of naked bodies are spliced beside church goers gyrating with the ecstasy of the lord.  Linked by movement, it’s a lovely co-existence of the sacred and profane.  In the south, it suggests, there is god and there is sex.

 

These credits create a space for the drama to unfold.  Even before the episode begins, the images draw you into the world of the series, and very effectively too.  It’s not just having a title sequence that doesn’t recycle images from within the show – there are plenty of shows with art designed openings – it’s that the credits complement and add to the episodes that follow.  You might not be a fan of schlocky vampire trash, but watch the titles – they’re awesome.

The Woman in the Dunes

Master of Ikebana, installation artist, director of operas and Noh theatre, Hiroshi Teshigahara was a man devoted to the aesthetic, and this is reflected in the powerful visuality of his films. I didn’t know Teshigahara until a boy who likes beautiful business cards lent me his crisp white box set, and although I’m scared to touch the covers for fear of making them dirty, I’m glad he did.

Based on Kobo Abe’s award winning book, The Woman in the Dunes is an existential story with a ridiculous plot, but it’s more about the metaphor than the reality. Jumpei (Eiji Okada) is a teacher and amateur entomologist. On a bug collecting trip in the dunes, he mistakenly accepts the hospitality of the seaside villagers, only to find himself trapped in a hollow with a lonely widower. Forced to shovel sand by night in order to keep the rickety hut from being buried, he at first resists, but after the woman falls pregnant, succumbs to his fate.

What makes the film so stunning is the incredible images. Opening with shots of abstract drawings based on the lines of the dunes, we then see a shot of the sand hills, stretching across the screen in a vast abstract design. I’d forgotten how striking a perfectly lit and exposed film can look. Every shot in The Woman in the Dunes has a full range of mid tones, and the slightly different skin colour of the two characters is perfectly balanced whenever they are on screen together. Teshigahara cuts cleanly between extreme, almost macro close-ups and long wide shots. The camera comes in close to the gritty, sand covered skin of the characters, creating abstract images out of their hair and the lines of their bodies. 

There is no escape from the ever shifting sand that cascades across the frame. At first, being stuck in the claustrophobic hut made the film difficult viewing for me, but the cinematic innovation overrode my initial discomfort. Just as Jumpei develops an eye for the details of the world around him, Teshigahara comes up with an incredible array of different shots from such a restricted location. It’s a beautiful lesson in filmmaking – now I want to use a macro lens.