Michael Shannon is "The Iceman".

“How do you feel about the people you killed?”
“I don’t.”
- HBO’s “The Iceman: Confessions of a Mafia Hitman”, 2001

That is the cold, remorseless response of Richard Kuklinski, the contract killer at the brutal centre of Ariel Vromen’s The Iceman. The title comes from Kuklinski’s media monicker, and while the name does not fall short of sensationalism it borders on dead accuracy too. He never blinked looking down the barrel of a gun, and he had even fewer reservations about pulling its trigger.

In The Iceman, Kuklinski is fully embodied by Michael Shannon, down to his monstrous physicality and gruff expressions. His voice is husky, a compartment of stoic words and the last heard by over 100 people. It’s actually speculated that Kuklinski had 250 victims – all males – and the body count of The Iceman doesn’t shy away from the severity of the notorious hitman’s acts. Shannon is restrained, predatorily defined by his slow movements and quick, deadly attacks. He rivals the menace of Anton Chigurh, only this character existed.

The Iceman is about Shannon’s talent as much as it is about Kuklinski’s ferocity. The movie is carried by the 38 year-old actor, but naturally because the movie looks into the dark, lifeless eyes of the contract killer and hopes to find somebody home. Shannon crafts a character who sheds as much sympathy and personality a man of Kuklinski’s nature could ask for. We watch Kuklinski in The Iceman with trepidation, and needless to say we’re not favourable towards his cause.

Vromen dramatizes the cipher of a killer through mood and tension. He creates an actual character with history, principle, and choices. Plus, the film’s narrative drive captures the murderous impulses of Kuklinski, which for me gives the film staying power but could on the other hand repel the majority.

Like the line from Hitchcock’s Rope “we killed for the sake of danger and for the sake of killing”, Kuklinski had a similar motto and yet stayed under the pretense of a businessman at a currency exchange. He had a wife (played here by Winona Ryder) and family, and lived in an all-American suburb in New Jersey. There’s a story that Kuklinski left his house on Christmas to commit a hit, and then returned home to watch his children play with their toys.

Despite this duality, The Iceman focuses more on Kuklinski’s crime life as a hired gun for the Gambino crime family. He’s employed by soldato Roy DeMeo (Ray Liotta), who used Kuklinski’s murderous ways to pay off an owed debt. As Kuklinski goes on his rampage, the film introduces many characters (and often victims) in a sort of “why’s he in this?” assembly line of talents, such as James Franco, Chris Evans, and David Schwimmer (all showing off handlebar mustaches). They’ve picked a worthy film, but one could almost confuse Kuklinski’s death march to the Hollywood walk-of-fame.

The film is, above all, a demonstration of Shannon’s acting abilities. He finds a way to disappear in his characters, yet at the same time the Shannon-ness is always there, so stoic and imposing in his irregular height and manner of speech. It makes up for some of Vromen’s stiff direction, which often reduces The Iceman to a series of hits on a one-noted rhythm. There’s repetition, facile flashbacks, and toothless moments. But the film is mostly an engaging, strident portrait of a deadly cipher and killing machine who lived up to his unholy name.

Jeff Buckley (Badgely) tributing his father and releasing his voice to the world.

We all know the saying “like father, like son”, but it’s hard to imagine the pressures of being the son who had to be “like” Tim Buckley, the late musician whose legacy left an indelible mark on the folk music scene and also produced 9 studio albums, 8 live albums, and innumerable compilations. The son was Jeff Buckley, a skinny, pallid, and rumply-haired musician who in his early career was recognized for uncannily resembling his father.

Around the beginning of Daniel Algrant’s Greetings from Tim Buckley, guitarist Lee Underwood (William Sadler) gasps that Jeff is a spitting image of his father, and right away the twenty-something prodigy has a legend to both make proud and overcome. The movie, above all, is about the mirroring life of Jeff, played startlingly well by Gossip Girl’s Penn Badgely, and his father (Ben Rosenfield), who both led successful musical careers cut tragically short (Tim died at 28, Jeff at 30).

Sadly, Jeff drowned from a boat’s wake in the Wolf River Harbor on May 29, 1997. Director Algrant chooses not to build to that unfortunate fate, and instead focus on Jeff’s early career when he performed a memorable singing debut at a Brooklyn tribute show for his father. The film doesn’t overwhelm itself with that “big game” mentality, and we’re luckily spared the Rocky-esque montage of Jeff strumming and doing push-ups before the premiere.

Greetings from Tim Buckley is an affecting character-driven story about a musician who was, at the end of the day, a young and impressionable artist. The movie surrounds his bond with a reserved but cute groupie named Allie (A Late Quartet’s Imogen Poots), who sees into Jeff’s gift of a voice. Their relationship feels like a slice of Jeff’s romantic life, one of those important kinships that helped him get by when the going was tough.

Badgely and Poots’s chemistry is so strong that Greetings from Tim Buckley could probably last as a rocker’s romance. Their scenes are touching mainly because Algrant authenticates their rapport through realistic dialogue and playful scenes that give off the airy feeling of newfound love. It’s perhaps a narrow way of dramatizing such an influential musician, but the modesty still amasses a lasting warmth.

And that is what Greetings from Tim Buckley becomes: a sensitive, wistful recollection of an inspired prodigy. The movie in fact omits the obvious trademarks of Jeff’s career, such as his recording of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and his working relationship as a sound mixer for Nirvana. Greetings from Tim Buckley is a humanization of Jeff Buckley, and he is not deified like a Bob Marley or Eric Clapton. Badgely, therefore, plays Jeff at an earthbound level but in one scene at a record store, Jeff rolls on the ground impersonating the voices of a variety of singers. What Jeff needed was a stage.

Naturally, the film climaxes at the Brooklyn tribute with Jeff performing to an ecstatic crowd. His band members encompass him, smiling as they watch Jeff’s talent bloom. Algrant shot the sequence live with a documentary style, taking us briefly out of the representationalism of fiction and into the immediacy of reality. I thought of The Last Waltz, Scorsese’s farewell concert film of The Band in November 1976. Just the spiritual synergy of the performers, the eclectic display of guitarists, pianists, and percussionists, and supportive audience.

Jeff’s central story gives Greetings from Tim Buckley its soul, a “Classical Gas” kind of warmth and poignancy. The effectiveness of this singular tale overshadows the flashbacks to Tim Buckley’s early career, when he met Jeff’s mother Mary Guibert. Those scenes come and go elusively, never carrying much weight to the overarching narrative. It’s not a fatal flaw by any stretch, but if it was integrated more effectively it would have substantiated the final shot, which gives finality but not exactly depth to the “like father, like son” crux. It’s a slight stumble for a film that plays most of its chords with modest precision.

Jay Gatsby (DiCaprio) and Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan) reunite in "The Great Gatsby".

The initial reactions to Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby, which opened this year’s Cannes Film Festival, are strangely similar to the ones of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s original 1925 book. Both works were first critically rebuked, respected only for a single redeeming quality: Luhrmann’s style and Fitzgerald’s prose. People complained that the latter’s characters were “marionettes” and in Luhrmann’s adaptation it can argued that the characters are merely dancing puppets of a cinematic pageantry.

But that’s not to say this new Gatsby adaptation will eventually be regarded, like Fitzgerald’s novel would, as some modern American masterpiece. Plus, with Luhrmann’s postmodern sensibilities his Great Gatsby is certainly not a purist adaptation for avid traditionalists. But in spite of the contemporary flourishes, Luhrmann is faithful to the structure and language of Fitzgerald’s story; he stays on-point by centering the film on the encounters of the observant Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), who stirs in a sanitarium regretfully recalling his “riotous excursions” with the Long Island elite. Like Fitzgerald, Carraway turned to the typewriter to find enough solace to the tell the true story of the great Jay Gatsby. 

Carraway’s story, at least in the novel, is a tragedy ensconced in the beauty and wealth of privileged New Yorkers. The Great Gatsby, like say Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, is about a man whose individuality is lost in a shallow sea of empty gratification and opulence. Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), the tragic hero of the tale, is a man without a core whose achievements can’t soothe a perpetual state of sorrow and longing for the earned affections of his lost love Daisy (Carey Mulligan), Carraway’s cousin to boot.

The novel captures this human struggle so vividly, and from an outsider’s perspective. We understand Gatsby according to the perceptions of Mr. Carraway, whose affection for the great man gives the book genuine heart and wisdom. The problem, primarily, with Luhrmann’s adaptation – and it’s a big one – is its lack of soul. While The Great Gatsby is about the hollowness of a decadent society, foppish Luhrmann revels in the decadence for as long as possible, taking a hypocritical standpoint to Fitzgerald’s criticism of high society.

Such indulgence could work if it represented Carraway’s experiences – his short-lived seduction by the flashy parade of soirees and mansion parties (to, of course, Beyonce and dubstep since that’s what they listened to in the Jazz Age…). Instead, Luhrmann’s camera scales the chandeliers, flying above the guests and capturing the action with an incoherent arrangement of closeups and long shots. Luhrmann’s best impulse is to overwhelm, but there is no swagger to the images like in the earliest moments of Michael Bay’s Pain and Gain. The introduction to Gatsby raising his glass as fireworks swirl in the background is a neglected image, its impact lost to the clumsiness of the preceding visuals.

Luhrmann’s flaw is his lack of impressionism; his camera movements fail to imbue the space with urgency and feeling. In fact, quite the opposite: for The Great Gatsby’s first hour, the movie is confusing, nauseating, and removed. Luhrmann dances to his own beat, but there is no sense of experience. Basically, there’s a blatant absence of narrative, discarding Fitzgerald’s attention to character dramatics and dynamics. What hurts this Gatsby, alas, is Luhrmann’s hyperactive direction. His love of decadence strips away Fitzgerald’s critique of the New York upper class communicated by the “unaffected scorn” of Carraway’s reactions.

What shores up this Great Gatsby are the performances, especially by DiCaprio, and Joel Edgerton as Tom Buchanan, the begrudging husband of Daisy. DiCaprio gets Gatsby down to the slightest of nuances with his “old sport” trademark, winning smile, and an affected attitude to mask his sorrows. DiCaprio is perfect at playing the icon with dirty secrets, and his Gatsby is refined and believable. Edgerton elevates Tom above cartoon and creates an envious bastard who somehow earns a penny of our pity.

In the thrust of the evening parties, it is learned that Gatsby wants Daisy back after his service in the trenches (Gatsby and Carraway are both war vets, and bond on that similarity). The sad-eyed and sensuous Daisy gives in to Gatsby’s charm and swoons that she always loved him. Drama boils when Tom becomes suspicious of the affair and that is when the events turn sour. Luhrmann’s camera finally steadies and focuses on the interactions of the characters, which befits the deliberation of Carraway’s narration (in particular, the face-off at the hotel is a worthy moment).

While the final act of The Great Gatsby carries some weight, you get the feeling Luhrmann only until now (say, the two-hour mark) finally caught on the point of Fitzgerald’s story: the wealthiest of lifestyles often possess the saddest of people with the darkest of secrets. Gatsby’s wishful thinking (“you can’t repeat the past? Of course you can!”) made him stand out from the crowd, and no one but DiCaprio can embody that “something gorgeous about him” quality Fitzgerald’s pen could only hope to describe.

Overall, however, I felt this Great Gatsby was pretty empty. The film is retrofitted to 3D, and while the ribbons and confetti curl more prominently, in terms of drama all you require is the crispness of 2D (fortunately, that’s how Great Gatsby has garnered most of its 63 million-dollar earnings). While the performers are confident enough to set the stage and engage us, Luhrmann is too caught up in the bustle of his visual style. At best, we get only the pretty contours of a great story.

Don't go into "Room 237"...but "The Shining" still keeps its doors wide open.

The Shining is probably Stanley Kubrick’s most mind-boggling film, certainly not his best but not far from what its poster heralds as “a masterpiece of modern horror.” Watching the film for maybe the seventh time the other day – but the first ever on the big screen, in a gloriously crisp 35mm print at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox – the film registered to me as droll. Many scenes, thanks to Kubrick’s craftsmanship, sink their hooks in you, while others hang loosely with pin-dropping bemusement.

Chiefly, the film really isn’t that coherent. The plot’s driven by obtuse happenings rather than the togetherness of incidents – yet that’s precisely why The Shiningcontinues to haunt me on a subconscious level, manifesting deep beneath goosebumps. Kubrick doesn’t want to explain the mysteries behind the Overlook Hotel, a Tudor-style luxury resort perched at the fore of the mountains of Colorado (the hotel is actually inspired by the allegedly haunted Algonquin resort the Fairmont St. Andrews in New Brunswick, where Stephen King visited and got the idea for the novel – I’ve also visited it, and my bedside light started to flicker on-and-off in the middle of the night…).

Kubrick’s refusal to tidy up the idiosyncrasies of The Shining is precisely the catalyst for Rodney Ascher’s new documentary Room 237. The latter hosts the opinions of a few Shining fanatics, who have watched the film plenty of times forward, backward, and the two superimposed on each other (that’s right, a 143-minute slow dissolve of the film in forward and backwards progression). I’ve experienced this to a lesser degree with David Fincher’s The Social Network and P.T. Anderson’s The Master, two films I have re-watched to the point reading into just fabricates meaning. The film’s become a compulsion, and that disarms the purity and spontaneity  of simplywatching a movie.

Now, I have been accused in the past of over-intellectualizing in my reviews. While I am certainly not innocent of over-thinking films, my goal as a film critic is to keep my analysis plausibly focused on what is explicitly and, to my knowledge, implicitly communicated in the frame. I think it is important to interpret the filmmaker’s intention, and argue if it is properly communicated through our responses. The subjects of Room 237 iterate their responses, but in a way that I feel trivializes The Shining and turns it more into a crossword puzzle of empty gestures and symbolism.

Ascher extends the mic to subjects who believe that The Shining is a metaphor of the holocaust, the genocide of Native Americans, and the Apollo 11 moon landing (the latter based on the famous conspiracy that Kubrick staged that great American feat). The documentary fails at what traditional documentaries bank on: a convincing argument. The film only succeeds at reminding us of the inanity of its subjects’ arguments, which is fun but only for so long. Eventually Room 237’s study of triviality doubles back and becomes trivial itself.

To his credit though, Ascher does not sympathize with these goons: “My [Ascher’s] personal take on it is [...] I just see it as sort of a story about juggling the responsibilities of your career and family and as cautionary tale of what may happen if you make the wrong choice.” Simple. And yes, there is a simplicity to Kubrick’s technique that can easily stifle the prattle of Room 237’s subjects. The searing strings by Wendy Carlos, Kubrick’s push-ins, and the terse conversation sequences cut to dreamy dissolves. Reality and illusion guide the film’s mysteriousness and tension, warping the film into an unspooling ball of uncertainty.

Isn’t that enough, guys? Pure technique? The subjects of Room 237 seem to not believe in the suspension of disbelief, and suppose so many theories The Shininginevitably morphs into comedy. Ascher uses digitally modified clips of Kubrick’s film, such as a scene in Greenwich Village from Eyes Wide Shut, that turn Kubrick’s meaningful moments into Ascher’s unsophisticated tongue-and-cheek. It’s a gimmick that dies fast, especially with at the shot of a sleepy Ryan O’Neal from Barry Lyndonmeant to suggest that the 1975 film was a bore-fest (completely disagree – it’s one of Kubrick’s best).

Nevertheless, a subject of Room 237 goes on to say that Kubrick was bored (not true) and had mastered the cinematic landscape (okay, true). The Shining, therefore, was really a jape, simply a matter of a master fucking with his audience. While for example The Shining has very fleeting references to Native Americans (look at the soup cans, the resort’s decor), I – like Ascher – try to boil it down to a central concept. What is it essentially about? I suppose family, above all. Madness, the supernatural, alcoholism…that’s all smoke-and-mirrors, genre components.

Or perhaps it’s all just a big charade. I often try to guess in the movies the single character whom the director would most identify with. In The Shining, Kubrick’s hard cynicism isn’t for the sniveling of Wendy (Shelley Duvall), nor for the amplified madness of Jack (Jack Nicholson), and betwixt and between Danny (Danny Lloyd) and Delbert Grady (Philip Stone), the two who possess the “shining”. We find the Kubrick-ness is the bartender Lloyd (Joe Turkel), a barely-there specter whose job is to simply pour the whiskey, with a grin, fueling the madness.

That may have been Kubrick’s assignment. Pour whiskey, let the Jack’s drink it. The Jack’s, in this case, are the subjects of Room 237 who ramble on and on in a sputtering quest for meaning. Ascher’s documentary is occasionally interesting, but don’t expect to raise your glass to it and utter “words of wisdom, Rodney, words – of – wisdom!”

My advice, lastly, is to treat The Shining not as a horror film, or a purveyor of endless conspiracies. Watch it for Kubrick’s craft, because it is there punctuating the chaos, spinning around in its mastery, and sometimes even signifying nothing. The film imposes on us, and then leaves hastily with a final image that says so much and yet

P.K. (Gage Munroe) locks and loads "I Declare War".

I Declare War is a no-holds-barred coming-of-age drama that is more than just dipped in the realm of fantasy. It exists, almost wholly, through the eyes and in the minds of several feral youngsters as they compete in a game of war in the woods (shot in Orange Valley, Scarborough over the course of 20 days). Yes, this is “Canadian” soil but directors Jason Lapeyre and Robert Wilson aren’t – ‘scuse the stereotype – making any apologies.

Instead, they are recalling their experiences on the imagined battlefield. Part of the film, strangely, feels personal and “inspired by true events”; but there’s little nostalgia to this tale, and more to the essence of raw energy. You get the sense Lapeyre and Wilson made this strictly for its time (The Hunger Games an apt contemporary reference) and in the moment. The key word is “urgency”, and that quality gives I Declare War its need for speed – keeping the rush even when the conceit seems likely to thin.

Written by Lapeyre, the screenplay takes a noble stab at hyper-dramatizing the war game, while still blending in certain feelings and insecurities that tend to hit us in our pre-teen years. The filmmakers assemble a whole dynamic amongst the characters – from both alliances – that reveals the power figures and the more timid types. Skinner (Michael Friend) is the domineering Skinner, who barks orders with his eyes locked open to prove he’s not kidding. Also, spunky PK (Gage Munroe) dodges bullets and leaps behind barricades in a compulsive effort to defeat Skinner’s clan.

The cast comprises a panoply of young warmongers, including Siam Yu, Aidan Gouvela, Andy Reid, Eric Hanson, etc. mostly male minus the character of Jess (Mackenzie Munroe), who has kind of an ethereal, maternal presence that rises above the juvenility of the feral children. A dewey-eyed boy named Frost (Alex Cardillo) crushes, of course unrequitedly making us think back to the time when that one girl turned her cheek, and the whole world seemed to drop below our feet.

Lapeyre and Wilson, fortunately, integrate such relatable experiences to make I Declare War not just a rat-a-tat run and gun. There is at least an effort to tell a thoughtful story, even if the film’s wild imagination sort of brings about some meandering and repetition. Sense to the action is coupled nicely by a childhood sensibility, which allows this coming-of-age yarn to, finally, come into fruition.

I Declare War’s biggest strength is in the tone it sets. While the story is deliberately absurd and fantastical, Lapeyre and Wilson succeed in telling a full-fledged drama, carrying the incredulous conviction, shared surely by these kids, that the war is actually happening. Instead of acknowledging the game is, well, just a game the filmmakers use toy M16s and balloon blood to intensify reality by enveloping it in fantasy. These early years often mark a time when our imaginations are their most overactive and impressionable, so Lapeyre and Wilson tap into this for the sake of immersion.

The result? A taut, unsentimental (that is to say, not “mopey” action-drama with enough raucous comedy in store that I Declare War offers an eclectic blend of tones and genres. The film seems to arrive at the point that, when all is said and done and the guns are stored away, the cease fire (also known as “dinnertime”) will make us realize who, in actuality, are our real friends and foes on the playground – who, when it comes down to it, would shield us from the blood balloon or chuck it at us. When duty calls, who will you stand by and protect?

It’s a fitting allegory, even if a “message movie” isn’t the intention here. Reality or fantasy – doesn’t matter – that’s a life lesson that applies wholesale, in and out of the trenches and into the no man’s land of real life.

Sidekicks: Robert Downey, Jr. and Don Cheadle face-off against the ruthless Mandarin in "Iron Man 3".

Iron Man 3 marks the first Marvel blockbuster of the summer (and, assumedly, a box office wonder), thus detonating the big bang of Hollywood spectacle and action-oriented narrative sure to disperse across the multiplexes these next coming months. The Marvel movies are typically theme-park rides, built on a grand scale and meant simply to thrill (Iron Man 2’s motif use of ACDC’s “Shoot to Thrill” was thereby apt).

Previous Iron Man director Jon Favreau stepped down (his cameo, however, remains as Tony Stark’s bodyguard), and his successor is Shane Black, notable screenwriter of Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout and director of the Robert Downey meta-fest Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (loved by many, not by me). Known to blend sly humor with heady action, Black sets out with a similar intention in this third installment. He succeeds in his own right, but he’s polishing a dry keg.

Yes, for my money the Iron Man movies are spent. Oddly, this new addition feels particularly faithful to the franchise, and drums to a likened beat of the earlier films. It makes me wonder: have I grown out of the Iron Man films, or have they grown out of me? What lessens my enthusiasm about the Marvel franchise is their formula of storytelling that quantifies scale instead of qualifying concepts. It’s not exactly cinema, but robotics.

The characters the cogs, the yarning plot the machine. You have the snarky, cocksure tech-y Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) living the high life, literally, in his cliffside California mansion with the love of his life Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). He’s tampering with different prototypes of his Iron Man gear, and has some C3PO-like artificial intelligent named JARVIS who follows his instructions.

Suddenly, the United States is threatened by another crazy, this time the Osama-minded, Gaddafi-dressed Mandarin (Ben Kingsley). He sends horrific videos to the White House, ruthlessly demanding the president’s cooperation. I’m reminded of Tom Cruise’s sharp line in Lions for Lambs: “bin Laden shows diplomacy by not filming the beheadings.” The Mandarin is yet another unreconcilable force, and Iron Man is of course the superhero to shut that super-villain down. Other cast members include: Guy Pearce, Don Cheadle, Rebecca Hall – all talented folk cashing big cheques.

What Iron Man 3 makes light of is Tony’s self-awareness of his superhero status. Tony at one point remarks: “it’s moments like these when I realize what a superhero I really am.” Black is interested in an irreverent Tony Spark who needs to occasionally drop the act and save some lives. Black sets up – but doesn’t really convey – the vulnerability of Stark. He starts to experience anxiety attacks after the climax of The Avengers (kind of ironic/hypocritical since that moment was a product of entertainment). It’s an interesting character flaw, but we don’t see it worked out in the bustle of the film.

Ultimately, Iron Man 3 is the same kind of romp as The Avengers – a film that fizzles from my memory the more I bother to analyze it. Similarly, while I won’t deny being entertained by parts of this film, there’s a hectic emptiness to everything. Characters never genuinely develop or transform in ways that are relatable, understandable, plausible to human experience. Stories are wedged under “plots”, where 130 minutes are constructed out of lego pieces of clunky exposition and far-out set pieces. Any sort of theme/sensibility feels manufactured and merely grafted onto the fireworks display of action.

Iron Man 3 has garnered praise for Black’s advancement of the material. He adds a few tricks, twists, and wisecracks that jack the film up with basic, superficial pleasures. The film wows a bit with a few fakes to the left, but mostly falling back on the old chestnut of the double identity gimmick. And that’s, at the end of the day, what Iron Man 3’s “themes” are – gimmicks, not genuine commentary on the unfolding story.

However, one sequence is quite grabbing: Iron Man rescuing a group of airplane stewards in a 20,000-foot free fall. The scene’s barreling intensity recalls the skydiving scene in Kathryn Bigelow’s very good Point Break, as our eyes remain fixed by the awe of such a great height. This is one moment of Iron Man 3 that truly immerses; yet the rest of the film seems to lack emotional interest. You get the sense that, despite a pretty watchable climax, the iron-cladded hero now has a few too many chinks in the armor.

The first time: a not-so intimate moment in the many first sexual encounters in the poignant "Just About Love".

Lola Doillon’s visual style in Just About Love (2007) is admirably observational with how it follows the film’s characters and naturally shows them interacting with their environment. This style is predominantly manifested in tracking shots, a technique that fosters an inherent intimacy amongst the characters, because it shows they are spatially close, coming in and out of the frame concurrently.

Several different types of “close” relationships develop within these spaces, most of which Maria Jose Garcia Werebe, in her article “Friendship and dating relationships among French adolescents”, associated with teenage dating or, what French adolescents called, the “flirt”: “this word, in French, is used by adolescents to describe a range of relationships having varying degrees of psycho-social and sexual intimacy, which can go from a mutual exchange of glances to relationships having a high degree of sexual intimacy to relationships which are more “serious” and longlasting” (Werebe 272).

Therefore, “dating” in an adolescent’s mind is a bond designated in broad strokes, since it is defined via a wide range of social interactions. This definition by Werebe ties in to the type of character interactions depicted by Doillon in Just About Love. Character development transpires out of quick glances and physical confrontations, with Doillon using the tracking shot to uninterruptedly dramatize this process.

For example when the cocky, insecure Nicolas excuses himself from class to get a condom Doillon shows how Nicolas communicates glibly with the teacher, to telling off Julie, and then finally giving a last apprehensive glimpse over at a watchful Vincent. Instead of filming this action through a series of shots, Doillon uses an unbroken shot to demonstrate all the different character relationships present in one tiny classroom space. Doillon shows these character relationships without explicitly telling character nuance with strained closeups. The tracking shot demonstrates the urgent spatial intimacy among the characters, while encouraging the audience to observe these nuances within a dynamically moving frame.

However, Doillon also holds the camera to not necessarily capture fleeting glimpses, but apprehension concomitant with adolescent angst and sexuality. This choice in style benefits scenes with a high degree of sexual intimacy, such as the (almost clinical) sexual encounter in the hotel between Nicolas and Elodie. Doillon holds the camera on the two for an uncomfortably long time, bringing out their reluctance (or perhaps inability) to take sexual action. By not cutting, Doillon invokes the lack of sexual traction and the sense that scene is building to catharsis.

But Doillon’s observational style is not solely devised through tracking shots. Conversations are shown in multiple cuts to focus on the specific words and reactions of the characters. The tracking shot rather is an effective tool for scenes involving non-verbal behaviour in lieu of important exchanges of dialogue. This technique gives Just About Love a spontaneity and the sense that different relationships are present at close range. The audience can gauge the “varying degrees of psycho-social and sexual intimacy” among the characters by showing how their relationships naturally take up the frame and exist in the finer details of their everyday dynamic.

Bibliography

Werebe, Maria Jose Garcia. “Friendship and dating relationships among French adolescents.” Journal of Adolescence. 10. (1987): 269-289.

The famously garish Trevi Fountain scene in "La Dolce Vita".

There is an important irony that Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (“The Sweet Life” – 1960) signifies a transition for Italian cinema, while its protagonist Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) is ostensibly in one himself. The first refers to La Dolce Vita as Fellini’s departure from Italian neorealism and themes of salvation and grace within a bleak Italian social reality. The second – ultimately the consequence of the first – indicates Marcello’s fruitless stroll through a new Italian reality of stardom and media consumption. The social reality was just as bleak, but it was adorned by Marcello’s self-gratifying, insatiable, and ostensibly pleasurable search for “the sweet life”.

Therefore, after reading Peter Bondanella’s “A Decisive Decade: Commedia all’italiana, Neorealism’s Legacy, and a New Generation”, Frank Burke’s analysis of La Dolce Vita in “Fellini’s Films”, and Mary Wood’s “Italian Cinema” I was able to closely examine the paradoxical meaning of “the sweet life” vis-á-vis the themes of stardom and media consumption.

At its core, La Dolce Vita is about stardom and the superficial life of the nonstop debauchery that comes with it. Where Fellini’s neorealist works like La Strada and I Vitelloni focused on characters trying to scarcely get by, La Dolce Vita is about maximizing fame and fortune. Bondanella’s short article simply lays the groundwork of mid-twentieth century Italy, when Italian cinema was able to explore outside neorealism’s “bleak social reality”.

This liberty was due to Italy’s economic boom, which led to new market opportunities, ideas, lifestyles, and images that challenged traditional Italian values (Bondanella 142). Like La Strada, La Dolce Vita’s protagonist, Marcello, is an outsider (a journalist on the rise) who wanders from lifestyle to lifestyle, but – due to Italy’s economic prosperity – is exposed to the rich and famous.

Thus, Marcello visits some extraordinary locations. He, and therefore the audience, marvels the splendor of 1960s Italy, instead of grieving over its devastation in a postwar context. The film jovially visits real landmarks like the Trevi Fountain, Saint Peter’s Square, Baths of Caracella, and Via Veneto. Meanwhile, it also brushes shoulders with celebrities like Anita Ekberg and Tarzan’s Lex Barker. Inadvertently or not, La Dolce Vita commemorates the golden age of early Italian cinema. According to Wood’s article, this era emphasized “authenticity of location [...] the new and sensational [...] and melodrama with maximum attention to emotional charge” (Wood 3).

Marcello sees his world melodramatically, as if it is bursting with lust and joy. He idealizes it like he does the American-Swedish star Sylvia (Ekberg): “[with] visual astonishment, projection, romantic wonder [...] never beyond romantic dependency” (Burke 101). His romantic incompatibility with Sylvia is almost comical, as he aimlessly follows her across Rome as she howls to stray dogs and nurtures a kitten – while Marcello aloofly observes. The charade ends anticlimactically with Marcello and Sylvia wading in the Trevi waters. At least to our eyes, there is no sexual intimacy, only Marcello “closing his eyes [...] celebrating Sylvia’s nonreflective ways” (Burke 101). She is an unobtainable sensation – both sexually and in lifestyle. Marcello fixes on the “purely sensual” (Burke 98), explaining why it takes him the whole film to realize his listlessness and that “the sweet life” is far from that.

However, Marcello’s discontent and “aloof” observations are not simply defined by his lack of celebrity status. They have much to do with his consumption of media and the artificiality it creates within Italian society. Burke argues that the Italy in La Dolce Vita is driven by newsworthiness, which “implies reproducibility rather than originality: the ability to be typed” (Burke 269). Media creates a world of impurity, sensationalism, and exploitation.

In La Dolce Vita, the paparazzo are more omnipresent than God. They take everything – be it the arrival of a media madonna (Sylvia) or a spiritual Madonna (Virgin Mary) – and turn it into a huge event. There are no religious gatherings now, just the next big scoop. The world of La Dolce Vita, as glamorous as it looks, is stifled by the perpetual reproduction of the image. This process is, ironically, meant for us to – like Marcello did with Sylvia – idealize, absorb, and celebrate the media’s “nonreflective ways”.

This interesting aspect of media is an ultimate indicator of La Dolce Vita’s most prominent symbol: Christ. Fellini inserts two versions of this symbol at the beginning and ending of the film. The opening sequence shows Marcello, by helicopter, hauling a statue of Christ over the outskirts of Rome. This action – scarcely different than an aerial banner towing – is Marcello advertising religion and, as a perk, asking for women’s phone numbers. Quite literally, Marcello is on top of the world (his idealized “sweet life”) and is doing to the statue of Christ what he did to Sylvia: “detaching [it] from [its] concrete surroundings and “reproducing” [it] as an icon of spirituality” (Burke 271).

On the other hand, the conclusion of the film features the arrival of a dead fish, suggesting the death of Christ. The fish’s dead and glassy eye, according to Burke, makes the creature “an image of solid matter devoid of spirit” (Burke 105). Both symbols are religious icons, yet one (statue) is reproduced and the other (fish) is not. The statue is beautiful but fake; the fish is ugly but real.

Therefore, La Dolce Vita’s mid-twentieth century Italy may have been, according to Wood, “fighting for its own autonomy faced with the consequences of increasing media” (Wood 31) but the arrival of an original image at the end of La Dolce Vita – though dead – signifies something essential: Marcello may have given in to the debauched and pointless life of a partygoer, but his hope of spiritual redemption is possible even in the face of this media-ridden world.

After studying Bondanella’s “A Decisive Decade: Commedia all’italiana, Neorealism’s Legacy, and a New Generation”, Wood’s “Italian Cinema”, and in particular Burke’s exploration of La Dolce Vita, it is clear Italy was dramatically shifting into a world no longer defined by religion, postwar depression, and lower class. It is possible Marcello was raised in that age, but in the mid-twentieth century he is forced to fight the tides of stardom and media consumption to live his idealized, beautiful but fake “sweet life”. If not, he might wash up on shore like the fish. La Dolce Vita represents – in its context – a monumental transition in cinema. Nonetheless, Marcello’s sad, lonely, and petulant soul had never changed.

Bibliography

Bondanella, Peter. A Decisive Decade: Commedia all’italiana, Neorealism’s Legacy, and a New Generation. 3. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc, 2007. 142-144.

Burke, Frank. Fellini’s Films: From Postwar to Postmodern. 1. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996. 98-108, 267-274, 324-326.

Wood, Mary P. Italian Cinema. 1. 63. New York: Berg, 2005. 1-34.

Charlotte Rampling.

In “Does a Long-Term Relationship Kill Romantic Love?”, Bianca P. Acevedo and Arthur Aron argue that “romantic love – with intensity, engagement, and sexual interest – can last. Although it does not usually include obsessional qualities of early stage love, it does not inevitably die out or at best turn into companionate love – a warm, less intense love, devoid of attraction and sexual desire” (59).

The long-lasting relationship of the svelte Marie and stout Jean Drillon in Francois Ozon’s Under the Sand (2000) complicates this statement by, with Jean’s sudden death/disappearance, challenging it. The audience witnesses not a revival or engagement of this “romantic love”, but the birth of obsession (what this article associates only with “early stage love”) and a break from Marie’s mundane reality in her longing for Jean’s return.

It is a “birth” because one can assume Marie did not marry Jean out of sexual desire (she is clearly out of his league). Furthermore, the film’s opening – a languid, prosaic trip to the beach captured by Ozon – instantly suggests Marie and Jean’s romantic love is impermanent and in a state of “companionate love”. Once Jean vanishes, Marie suffers delusions due to intense grief, denial, and desire.

The boredom and loneliness of her apartment – visualized by the urine-yellow lighting of the apartment, drab symmetry, and empty space – worsens her mental state. The setting’s dull realism in effect cues Marie’s arrival into unreality (i.e. delusion) – an involuntary act of escapism. There she obsesses over Jean, but in an uncharacteristically sexualized way. Her love for Jean becomes no longer companionate (“warm”, “less intense”), but obsessive – that is: carnal, lewd, and besotted.

Marie’s first delusion involves her engaging in harmless, old-couple banter with her husband at the apartment. It is innocuous, yet the audience can acknowledge its abnormality since both it and Marie have experienced Jean’s L’Avventura-like disappearance (only the audience knows though Jean is not actually present). Marie’s fantasies escalate into highly sexualized reveries. When Marie masturbates, Ozon cuts from a closeup of her head to her crotch as if to disconnect body (sex) and mind (intellect).

Then we witness several male hands grope Marie’s face, conveying her uncontrolled and accelerated desire for sexual pleasure and male company. When Marie fornicates with her new sexual partner, Vincent, near the end of the film she fantasizes Jean catching her. This sexual act is thus fantasized as infidelity, but one that both excites and, with Jean smiling approvingly, absolves her.

Marie’s delusions in Under the Sand are enormously complex, because they present her obsessions as a complicated containment of guilt, denial, and desire. Ozon’s unromantic style demonstrates that Marie’s fantasies do not express a lasting romantic love for Jean, but a masturbatory obsession for his return and caress. Her mourning is in fact a discovery of delayed infatuation for her late husband. Ozon exhibits, through form and content, that Jean’s departure inspired a deep sexual yearning – a delusion – in Marie that pulls her out of her languorous reality.

Bibliography

Acevedo, Bianca P., and Arthur Aron. “Review of General Psychology.” Review of General Psychology. 13.1 (2009): 59-65.

Rachel Weisz is the unwavering, intelligent Hypatia in "Agora".

Alejandro Amenabar’s Agora is a fitting way to wrap up this course, because it emulates many of the studied peplum tropes, in order to tell a Roman epic that is convincingly cerebral in nature. As the late critic Roger Ebert wrote: “I went to Agora expecting an epic with swords, sandals, and sex. I found swords and sandals, some unexpected opinions about sex, and a great deal more.” (Ebert) Ebert indicates that Agora challenges the contemporary preconceived notion, as a result of Hollywood action bombast like Clash of the Titans and Immortals, that peplum films automatically involve a robust male hero with a gorgeous woman tucked at his side, and plenty of chariot races to carry us along to the conclusion.

Agora may not be encumbered by these conventions, but it is worth also noting that it still maintains some of the 1950s peplum identity. In this essay therefore, I will discuss Agora’s unique function within the sub-genre by demonstrating how it presents and portrays the characters, manipulates key peplum visual and thematic tropes, and lastly serves as a contemporary religious artifact.

As usual with peplum movies, Agora’s cast is expansive, as it must be to decorate the large cityscape. Situated in the city of Alexandria (filmed actually in Malta), the film surrounds many pugnacious characters who argue over the current political and social landscape. Amenabar uses long shots frequently to capture the overwhelming population of city folk. While Agora is certainly conversation-driven (and hence more tied to contained dialogue sequences), the film does not shy away from spectacle in order to emphasize a city “lost in the mass of the crowd, always struggling forward, and yet, forever pushed back.” (Moschini 30) But the cast is not merely window dressing; each character individually represents a certain political, intellectual or religious point-of-view on their society.

Like the peplum epics Ben-Hur and Spartacus, many of the central characters, such as female thinker Hypatia (Rachel Weisz) and slave Davus (Max Minghella), are disenfranchised and have to be tenacious to rise above their suppressed status. The film, like in The Fall of the Roman Empire, creates a large assembly of characters who are not instantly identifiable as heroes (why perhaps the film is broadly called “Agora” not specifically “Hypatia”). Without a clearcut hero, Agora creates multiple characters to show that the Roman Empire is wearing down and without a single hero to change that, the empire will inevitably dissolve from the clashing of dissenting minds.

Secondly, Agora interestingly uses and often supplants classic peplum tropes. On one hand you have the obligatory romance, which Amenabar astutely omits. Davus and Orestes (Oscar Isaac) are enticed by Hypatia, but she is a virgin and therefore does not submit to the desires of either. She pursues wisdom, not sex and thus Agora eschews the heavy undertones of romance and sexuality concomitant with the peplum.

Also, Amenabar embraces the Quo Vadis and Ben-Hur trait of the Big Meaning movie. It is wrapped up in seriousness and the absurd, campy wit of the Hercules movies is nowhere to be found. Amenabar’s script also upholds the literacy and eloquence of Dalton Trumbo’s screenplay for Spartacus, but the former’s work is more ideologically coherent.

Agora is an Idea Movie, yes, but it is actually about ideas not sanctimony (while Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments – though good – are the latter). Instead of just spectacle for the sake of spectacle, Agora uses its images for motif (circles especially), demonstrating theme visually rather than in didactic dialogue. Therefore, Agora certainly resembles visual and thematic qualities of the peplum, occasionally emulating peplum tropes but in a way that is sincere and coherently blends highbrow themes with the majestically imposing visuals.

Lastly, Agora imitates 1950s peplum by mirroring contemporary religious issues. The Christian-pagan conflict is typical of peplum, but Amenabar vilifies the Christians – a blatant subversion of peplum, since earlier films of the sub-genre regarded Christians as martyrs and righteous folk. In Agora, the Christians are barbarians and violently overzealous as witness in the storming of the pagan city in which a Christian mob destroy the Serapeum and burn the library’s scrolls. In a modern sense, this sequence “could echo the destruction of the Buddha statues in Afghanistan by the Taliban, who invoked the reason that they represented an insult to their faith.” (Moschini 31)

Agora reaped much controversy from Christians over these parallels, since the film seemed to view fundamentalism in a fanatical and murderous light. (Moschini 33) Amenabar’s film, unlike the 1950s peplum, did not put Christians on a pedestal as sort of the all-American heroes. As a Spanish filmmaker, Amenabar evaluates Middle Eastern religious tensions, using a religious sensibility to apply the film’s fourth-century A.D. context to contemporary religious issues. Agora is as much an epic of spectacle as it is a potent religious commentary of modern times, a quality we have witnessed in earlier peplum.

In conclusion, Agora resembles the peplum films we have studied in this course, while at the same time is an evident departure. By examining the film’s presentation and portrayal of the many characters, use of peplum visual and thematic tropes, and allegorical references to modern religious tensions we can begin to understand what Ebert meant when Agora rewarded him with “a great deal more.”