NYFF 2011: Critic's Notebook III

NYFF 2011: Critic's Notebook III

by Vadim Rizov

Sean Durkin's Martha Marcy May Marlene starts in media res and hops between Before and After for the rest of the film. Before, Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) is a fresh-faced cult inductee in thrall to wiry creep Patrick (John Hawkes), whose high-toned rhetoric about communal living and folksy acoustic guitar performances are a cover for sexual abuse and worse. After, Martha's taken refuge with her sister Lisa (Sarah Paulson) somewhere upstate, but she keeps lapsing back to before: a jump in the lake behind her sister's house plunges the camera into a river close to the cult, and the glass car window Martha smashes on the compound is juxtaposed with her polishing the large smooth windows of Lisa's summer rental.

When Martha shows up at her sister's, she acts like a schizophrenic: her spazzing seems unprovoked, and her behavior crosses the line from immature to worryingly unsocialized. Durkin and ace DP Jody Lee Lipes emphasize her disconnection from the "real world" in every way possible: the opening introduction of her laboring in a kitchen without electricity could be from anytime in the last 150 years of American rural living. Though the film's present-day setting is soon established, it takes Martha time to tune back in to the world outside the compound, and for a while the film keeps her isolated in the frame or in shallow focus, with the indistinct background and all other people seeming further away than they are.

The obvious question is what made Martha leave; if the answer isn't very surprising, her sisterly interactions are. Martha condescendingly lectures Lucy's husband Ted (Hugh Dancy) with stale bromides about how money's unimportant and what's necessary is just "space to be." Lucy?a thoroughgoing materialist who offers her sister a kale-ginseng smoothie first thing in the morning as a matter of course?isn't just upset with her sister about disappearing without a word for two years and scaring the hell out of her; she's also peeved Martha's apparently none the worse for the wear despite having made all the wrong, non-kale-juice-drinking decisions in life. "You're very beautiful," she tells her after having Martha try on one of her dresses. "It's really rather irritating."

Despite their ostensibly at-odds opinions on money, Martha and Lucy have more in common than either would admit: they've both dropped out of the working world because they can, rurally isolated from urban problems or real social context. All those parallel edits and associations help keep the viewer up to speed with Martha's subjective associations, helping explain why she freaks out when her behavior otherwise seems inexplicable, but they also underline the point. White people retreating to the countryside for isolation are similar but different, whether self-congratulatorily affluent or composed of girls who use the compound's only landline to hit up their parents up for money to finance their equally self-congratulatory "simple," disconnected lifestyle. All those parallels aren't just ironic contrasts between two similar objects in radically different settings: they're the same object in the same kind of setting.

Pitting heartless materialism vs. brainless (and even more predatory) cult behavior, Martha Marcy May Marlene equates two things it equally disapproves of with detached intensity, with Marcy's merciless criticisms of her sister's superficiality emerging so suddenly from Alzheimer's-like lucid patches that they're funny just for being so unexpected. Martha and Lucy may be cartoon stand-ins individually, but together they're two sides of a film that works both as an understatedly terrifying portrait of a communal cult and a portrait of the vapid world its members escaped from.

A true retreat is staged by an amusingly gnarly hippie in Ben Rivers' Two Years at Sea, which is more like 86 Minutes with a Guy Who Lives by Himself in the Woods; he could be anywhere, though you might as well know that his name's Jake, he banked his chance to live far away from people by saving wages (from two years at sea), and he's in Scotland.

Knowing these facts adds almost nothing to this film experience, which offers two distinct pleasures. One is the texture of the worked-over, black-and-white widescreen 16mm, blown up to 35mm after being hand-processed by Rivers into a quavering field of large, extremely unstable pixels. The B&W's sometimes warm in its fuzziness, and other times merely blotchy. Either way, it's a self-contained visual universe that never stops offering fresh sights. The highlight is arguably Jake taking a rubber raft onto a lake, sitting motionless on the water and drifting for a good seven minutes; the concentric circles emerging from his smallest motions are charcoal lines against a smudgy gray-white background as the small ripples hypnotize.

The other big appeal is watching a man doing absolutely whatever he likes. Monastic silence isn't Jake's speed, who mutters to himself like a lesser Muppet while sorting laundry, and blasts folk music from a megaphone while sorting rubbish in the yard. In one shot, his cabin appears to levitate from the ground to the top of a tree, where it sits perched for the rest of the film, giving Jake an awesome view whenever he wants to retreat from ground-level life entirely, a tiny magical intervention.

Jake's at peace to sit, watch and listen exclusively to nature and noise of his own making, and the film does the same. The house cat's ears twitch while staring at the dryers, and it's the most peaceful scene in all of this year's New York Film Festival. The whole movie's on the same vibe. Fans of Uncle Boonmee and similar arthouse nature retreats will know the feeling of slipping into a deceptively modest natural reverie. Here, it's so modest in its narrative demands that it's even more ridiculously atmospheric and enveloping.

Because Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's work prior to their 1996 breakthrough La Promesse never made much of a splash on these shores (or, indeed, anywhere far outside of Belgian Marxist TV circles), some viewers may find their latest, The Kid with a Bike, to be business as usual?aside from the relative novelty of music. (The piece is the same every time: 22 bars from the "Adagio" in Beethoven's "Emperor Concerto," repeated thrice, then allowed to expand for the end credits, which is three more uses of music than in their last feature, 2008's Lorna's Silence?which had an ill-advised final-minute cue that came out of nowhere. That, in turn, was an increase of 100% over their previous three features, which had absolutely no non-diagetic music. But I digress.)

This isn't so much a concession to audiences as a return to the brothers' little-known second feature, 1992's You're on My Mind, where a recently fired industrial worker descends into alcoholism and sexual jealousy in a fairly conventional three-act arc (fall, fall, further semi-redemption) set to an overbearing score. The Kid with a Bike isn't that strident about labor's toxic effects on its workers, or hamhanded about its melodrama. Nonetheless, the brothers are feeling confident enough to add some music, have a psychological blank as a main character, and use an overtly familiar structure. This is their self-described riff on a "fairy tale," and there's an appropriately light-hearted feel that's new.

Act One: horrific teen Cyril (Thomas Doret), unable to accept that his father has abandoned him, runs away from children's home workers, biting his way to freedom as need be. As awfully as he acts, he has a point: there's no excuse for a dad who just up and leaves with no notification because he wants to start over. With the help of hairdresser Samantha (Cecile de France), who intervenes for no particular reason, Cyril accepts his abandonment. Act Two: now Samantha's foster ward, Cyril (as if recognizing he longer has justification for his projections of rage) calms down, but promptly gets sucked into the small-scale criminal enterprises of local dealer Wes (Egon di Mateo), who lures Cyril with his PlayStation and knowledge of "Resident Evil." Errors of judgment follow. Act Three: having reconciled with both Samantha and the justice system, Cyril atones morally.

Most of the Dardennes' films showcase characters who make a mistake of one kind or another, and spend the rest of the film pursuing redemption. There's the son keeping a promise to an illegal immigrant fatally taken advantage of by his father in La Promesse; the father who carelessly sells his baby, then chases him back in 2005's L'Enfant; Lorna's poorly-thought-out scheme (which leads to someone else's death), and her subsequent attempts to rectify the ethical balance. This kid's more sinned-against than sinner, and his perpetual running aligns him with the Dardennes' 1999 heroine Rosetta, an equally obnoxious, inexhaustible character with a legitimate if poorly expressed grievance.

Far from business as usual, The Kid with a Bike sees the Belgian bros deliberately making a simplified, psychologically opaque, feel-good-ish movie; a career first. The generic contours (wild child, saint-like adoptive parent, slow-motion socialization) are as plausible as they need to be thanks to the lived-in atmosphere. It doesn't seem to have much more of a social message than "Fathers, if you abandon your sons, you really suck," which is easy to get behind. A soothing extract of Beethoven early on reassures viewers all will turn out well: the Dardennes aren't ironists or sadists. The suburbs of Seraing?the brothers' hometown and constant staging ground, typically shown for its drab, industrial qualities?are captured for once in bright summer. It just feels warmer.

In Cyril's harsh universe, all cruelty and indifference is acutely depicted. Samantha's mystifying, impossible-to-explain goodness drags the film away from both miserabilism and hokey happy-go-luckiness. Like 2002's The Son, a criminal who has paid his legal debt faces an angry victim contemplating going full Chuck Bronson, but the moral question that took up almost all of the earlier film is dealt with in an unbelievably speedy third act?perhaps eight minutes? Despite its occasional grimness (and two gasp-worthy bouts of violence presented with an unnerving lack of warning), Bike hints early at a happier ending, allowing viewers to relax and enjoy the crisply moving camera's views in and of themselves. The Dardennes' tonally mastered style gives minor robberies and scurrying children the charge of entire Bourne action set-pieces. In their way, the directors are as dedicated to kinetic thrills as any car-chase mongers. It's as if they were reveling in their own skill and trying not to dampen the mood, but they've certainly earned it. If not the richest film of their career, Kid is the most effortlessly enjoyable.

Posted by ahillis at October 11, 2011 3:16 PM

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