ScreenFish

where faith and film are intertwined

film noir

Reporting from Slamdance – Narrative Features (part 2)

by Leave a Comment

Here is another round of narrative features that are part of this year’s Slamdance Film Festival. This set of films is from around the world.

The world premiere of No Trace (Nulle Trace) from Canadian director Simon Lavoie served as the Opening Night film. Set in a dystopian future, the film begins with watching railroad ties go by before we discover “N”, a woman whose face shows years of struggle, driving a handcar along the tracts. When she stops, she picks up Awa, a young Muslim woman and her baby, and secrets them away in a crate to smuggle across the border. After a successful drop off, uniting the young mother with her husband, N returns to her travels. But misfortune will reunite the two women in a struggle to survive in the wilderness.

The film is shot in stark black and white in such a way to portray a cold, empty world. The world the two women inhabit seems to have lost all morality beyond the rule of the strongest. N is a survivor and is not opposed to using force if necessary. Yet when she finds Awa a second time, she cares for her, even at a cost to herself. The two women are very different, not just in age and looks, but in perspective. A part of that difference is faith. At one point, Awa asks N if she is a believer. N responds that she has never been that desperate. She tells Awa that belief “won’t help you survive.” But Awa continues in her prayer and trusts in God to deliver her—either in this world or the next.

The world of foreign domestic workers is the focal point of Alberto Gerosa’s Dea, making its world premiere at Slamdance. This is the story of a 20 year old Indonesian woman who contract to go to Hong Kong as a domestic worker. The understanding is that she will make enough money that she can send most of it back to help her family. What seems like an opportunity for a good life, ends up with many slights and disrespect, some small, but others serious, including sexual assault. When she loses her job, she has no real status in the society.

The film has 40 co-writers listed, each only with a first name. It is the result of an acting lab made up of immigrants in Hong Kong and Macau. Everything that happens to Dea in the film is based on things that happened to these young women. The socio-economic realities that the film brings forth are not limited to Hong Kong, of course. Exploitation of the poor is a near universal occurrence.

Isaac (Izaokas), from director Jurgis Matulevičius, is a Lithuanian film noir, set in Soviet Lithuania in 1964. In an introduction that takes place during World War II, with Jews being tormented and killed by Nazi sympathizers. This event becomes the focus of a film that Gedas Gutauskas wants to make. Gedas has just returned to Lithuania from 20 years in the US where he’s gained fame as a writer and film director. He reconnects to two old friends, Andrius and Elena. The three were very close until Gedas escaped to the West. Andrius and Elena are married, but the marriage has gone sour. The authorities are following and bugging Gedas. An investigator wants to re-open the case of a murder during that World War II event because Gedas’s script is so accurate, he thinks Gedas must have been involved. In reality it is Andrius who is tied to the story.

As with any noir film, there are twists as we slowly come to understand the truth, not only of that terrible event that opens the film, but also the relationships between Gedas, Andrius, and Elena. It also reflects a bit of the Soviet era angst with police surveillance and a hint at official corruption that only wants certain truths to be exposed. The film is mostly black and white, with the middle section in color. That middle section is the least noirish part of the film.

Motherless Brooklyn: Pulling at the Thread of Power

by Leave a Comment

Directed and adapted for the screen by Edward Norton, Motherless Brooklyn tells the story of Lionel Essrog (Norton), a Brooklyn detective in post-war New York. Working with street smart private investigator Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), Lionel (who also goes by the name Brooklyn) and his team uncover the truth for hire. However, when Minna is shot and left for dead, Lionel determines to unravel the mystery, plunging him into a Brooklyn underworld riddled with crime, corruption and colourful characters. As his quest for truth leads him further up New York’s ladder of power, Lionel’s investigation is complicated by his Tourette syndrome, which leaves him prone to compulsive behavioural tics and inappropriate verbal outbursts.

Adapted from the 1999 novel of the same name, Brooklynis a tightly written throwback film to classic Hollywood’s noir films like The Big Sleep or Chinatown. With a stellar cast and tightly written script, Norton creates a world which feels both foreign and familiar. While the film transports the audience back to 1950s New York, it also feels current in today’s culture, highlighting racial tensions and the growing divide between the upper and lower classes. In Motherless Brooklyn, power is a drug that gives people the freedom to ‘do whatever they want, whenever they want’ but it’s also short in supply. Divided by racial and financial lines, Brooklyn is a city on the brink of chaos.Those that have little power are struggling to make their voices heard while those who have much fight ferociously to maintain it. 

As Brooklyn himself, Norton’s performance is sharp, engaging, and loving. At the same time, the character becomes a metaphor for the town for which he’s named. Plagued by Tourette Syndrome, Brooklyn feels as though there’s a chaos in his mind that bubbles over and has to be released. While the casual passerby may not immediately notice Brooklyn’s struggle, his mental chaos inevitably reveals itself. With this in mind, the film clearly draws a line between his character and the city itself, as its own unseen chaos can’t help but overflow from the underground. Diffused lighting and growing shadows point to tension between light and darkness, as Brooklyn (the character) attempts to uncover the truth about Brooklyn (the city). Like his compulsion to pull on the threads of his sweater, Brooklyn also must unravel the web of deception until the facts about his city is revealed.

Furthermore, the film also does not shy away from engaging in the complexities of Brooklyn’s mental health issues. Bullied as a child for his affliction, Brooklyn has always been the one that was pitied by others. After Minna’s death, Brooklyn becomes seen by others primarily for his mental affliction as they constantly try to ‘look out’ for him, rationalizing that he needs their protection. Frustrated by his inability to control his mind and constantly reminded of the burden he is by others, Brooklyn remains ashamed and embarrassed by his behaviour. 

Conversely, however, while clearly struggling with his mental illness, he also recognizes its value. Despite the chaos within him, his Tourettes is also what makes him a great detective by forcing him to ‘pull on the thread’ of truth and allowing him to retain incredible amounts of information. What’s more, the film even paints a portrait of Tourette syndrome with an element of beauty by highlighting the musical aspect of Brooklyn’s mental chaos. (For example, this comparison is highlighted when, in one particularly poignant scene, Brooklyn’s inadvertent vocables cause him to become a participant in a jazz ensemble.)

Featuring strong performances and well-written script, Motherless Brooklyn is an entertaining and engaging return to the noir genre. Under the Norton’s direction, the film is also impressive visually, as the shadows and darkness of New York’s underworld are constantly warring against the light of truth. 

Motherless Brooklyn unravels the mystery in theatres on November 1st, 2019.

Shadows of Power: 1on1 with Edward Norton (MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN)

by Leave a Comment

Directed by Edward Norton, Motherless Brooklyn tells the story of Lionel Essrog (Norton), a Brooklyn detective in post-war New York. Working with street smart private investigator, Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), Lionel (who also goes by the name Brooklyn) and his team uncover the truth for hire. However, when Minna is shot and left for dead, Lionel determines to unravel the mystery, plunging him into a Brooklyn underworld riddled with crime, corruption and colourful characters. As his quest for truth leads him further up New York’s ladder of power, Lionel’s investigation is complicated by his Tourette syndrome, which leaves him prone to compulsive behavioural tics and inappropriate verbal outbursts. Adapted from Johnathan Letham’s book of the same name, Norton wanted to bring the story to life due due to the interesting and complex nature of its lead character.

“The character [of Lionel] was entirely the initial hook for me,” he begins. “The many things that got woven into it to sort of expand on its scope or the broader target that it had ultimately were not where I was within the beginning. I just was completely enamored with this character that Jonathan Letham created, not just because he’s a unique character with a unique condition and the idea of sending him, a person with those mental gifts and challenges, up against the idea of solving mysteries is just sort of fun. [It was also that] Jonathan’s emotional hook is brilliant. It’s exactly what we… transposed in the film.”

“You hear his inner voice from the opening page. You’re inside his head. You know him free of his condition. You know his inner mind, his inner heart and then, you see him on the outside [where] he’s kind of a hot mess of ticks and twitches and shouts [so] watching him navigate that is funny and poignant. That’s all before the end of page two. You’re rooting for him. He’s a great underdog character. You’re laughing, wincing and you [know that] wherever this guy’s going, it’s going to be fun because watching him navigate this is itself the pleasure. That was the entirety of my initial interest in it.” 

Though many of his characters over the years have appeared to struggle with a variety of conditions, Norton feels like this may be the first chance he has had to portray a man with genuine mental health issues onscreen. In order to prepare for the role, much of his research involved exploring the individualistic nature of Tourette syndrome.

“I’m trying to think if I have played characters with authentic mental health issues. I’ve played [many] characters who are faking…” laughs Norton. “So, I actually think arguably this is the first time I’ve played a character with an authentic psychological condition. It’s not a reductive , like how do you approach it? There are documentaries about people with Tourette’s. I’ve met some. You talk to people. For me, honestly, because Tourette Syndrome has many components and can be expressed in people in very individualistic ways… what I set myself out to do was find out what are a credible sort of symptomatic pieces of it and then build my own basket of them for Lionel so that you can create a weave of consistent things, like his compulsion to tap people that he feels close with or his compulsion that the idea of having a single word – in his case ‘if’ – that he says over and over… Then, [I tried to] structure that into the story…” 

However, Norton also argues that much of the importance in representing mental illness onscreen lies in refusing to allow one trait to define the character entirely.

“I don’t actually tend to think that representing physical manifestations of a thing are the hardest thing or the most important challenge,” he explains. “I think the bigger thing is not reducing any kind of disability to the whole of that person’s character. I think [that] if there’s anything people I’ve talked to say really drives them nuts, it’s when it’s made all about the disability. Obviously, in this [film], a huge part of this is Lionel’s love for Frank. It’s his sense of being motherless. It’s as much about the fact that he has never been a person who, as he says, looks past his own problems. So, I kind of concern himself with the rest of the world, you know? He’s got to grow up like anybody else… But what I think is really cool is when Laura [says], that it’s not everything. ‘Everybody’s got something,’ she says kindly. We’ve all got daily battles, right? And, it really pulls him up. Suddenly, someone’s looking at him and not seeing him just for that. They’re saying that’s just a part of life.” 

In light of this, one of the film’s more poignant scenes highlights the complicated nature of Lionel’s Tourette syndrome by comparing it with the sonic beauty of jazz music.

“I think jazz has a very Tourettic characteristic,” says Norton. “There’s the idea of looping around, playing with variations on a theme. The kind of exuberant release that is in jazz. There’s a great passage in the book about Prince’s music, but obviously we weren’t going to do that [due to the film’s period setting]. So, to me, the idea of… a scene where you see and feel for once [of] Lionel happily losing his inhibition and finding a moment of poetic liberation in it was a neat idea. I liked the idea of it that he finds an affinity with a Charlie Parker, [or] Dizzy Gillespie kind of a figure who sees him.” 

While the film’s title extends from Lionel’s nickname, it is also focuses its lens on the future and well-being of Brooklyn itself. Asked whether or not he sees any comparison between Lionel and the city, Norton believes that any comparison lies in the damage that happens when anyone (or anything) is left ‘motherless’.

“I think [the idea of the title, Motherless Brooklyn is expressed when] Laura says that, ‘We all need someone looking out for us.’ On an individual level, it’s a very lonely condition to not have anyone caring for you… Some people said to me, ‘Why are you going to… break your back trying to figure out on a budget how to effectively recreate Penn Station?’ It is kind of tilting at windmills, but it’s not nothing. The micro scale is that its lonely and sad and hard to be alone in the world and people should take care of each other. But, on the macro, it’s that, if our city is motherless, we lose Penn Station. We lose things that we’ll never get back… We lose some of the richest, most diverse communities in Brooklyn [and they] get replaced with the worst ghettos in the world, the projects. They literally [take] stable places, call them slums, rip them down and put up slums. There’s aesthetic loss. You lose the things that make a place great, like Penn Station, and to me it was like, you’ve got to see the ghost of what we lost. To make the subconscious point, these are the costs of allowing power to tell us all to get out of the way.” 

Using the shadows of its 1950s noir atmosphere, Brooklyn explore the perils of absolute power upon the average citizen. With this in mind, Norton believes that the corruptive nature of power takes root when authorities lose sight of the value of others.

According to Norton, “I think that part what creates the drive for power in some people is impatience with other human beings and a lack of authentic affection for [others]. I think we’re in an era where we’re seeing it expressed in a new resurgence of a very exclusionary idea of what America is, not only antagonistic to our actual ideals, but antagonistic to our whole history. That’s what’s so crazy about it. It’s like this romance for a thing that never existed in the first place. But it’s like what my friend (who is Mexican) said, ‘This is the Latin American hefe (or ‘dictator’) problem.’ There’s something base in us that responds to the audacity of someone [else] saying, ‘I’m going to punch through the inefficiency of us having to all work together and just get [stuff] done.’ It’s like some part of us goes, ‘yeah…’ It’s amazing that, in 2019, we’re actually still grappling with the idea that, under the right circumstances, people will elevate a bully.” 

While some might immediately assume that he is solely addressing the current presidency, Norton argues that abuses of power extend far beyond the Trump era.

“I think the thing that I was trying to look at is the idea that, in America, we’re supposed to know where the power is,” he continues. “It’s with us, right? That’s where it’s supposed to be. It’s not supposed to reside in places that we not only didn’t assign it, but we don’t realize that it has become outside of our purview… When where the power is [remains] unseen, that’s a truly dangerous situation because we’re walking around in democracy, thinking everything’s okay. We believe in the system and we don’t realize that there are forces dictating what’s really happening, that do not have our best interests in mind. That’s the most dangerous situation. To me, that’s as much about the Koch brothers as it is about Trump.” 

“The darker idea is that like there’s a mayor being inaugurated [who is] completely irrelevant and we’re about to learn that the guy who is patiently looking at his watch in the shadow of a column, whose face we haven’t seen…, is the one who calls all the shots. Whether you want to ascribe it to Citizens United or an intrinsic part of American life and capitalism that enormous amounts of power get amassed outside of the political system and to the degree that they own the political system or are evading the political system. That’s what Ralph Nader rightly said. ‘The great challenge of democracy will be whether people can retain the priority of human interest over corporate interests (he would say) … but the interest of power, basically.’” 

To hear full audio of our interview with Norton, click here.

Motherless Brooklyn uncovers the truth in theatres starting November 1st, 2019.

Serenity: Murder and Justice in the Open Water

by Leave a Comment

Living on an isolated tropical island, Baker Dill (Matthew McConaughey) is a fishing boat captain who lives a peaceful life on Plymouth Island, an isolated island in the Carribbean. However, his world is soon shattered when his ex-wife Karen (Anne Hathaway) tracks him down and, desperate for help, begs Baker to rescue her and their young son from her abusive husband, Frank (Jason Clarke). Offering Dill $10M to feed her husband to the sharks in the open water, Karen pleads with him to take on the job. Thrust back into a life that he wanted to forget, Baker now finds himself struggling to choose between right and wrong.

Although the film is fairly uneven—not to mention the wildest twist you can imagine—there are enough things to like about Serenity for those who are game. Directed by Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders, Eastern Promises), Serenity is a neo-noir film laced with sci-fi sensibilities. (No spoilers.) Set on the isolated island in the Caribbean, Knight drops the audience into a steamy world of sex and betrayal. Using bleached colours and shadowy frames, the world is lush in vegetation yet colours bleed together, resulting in a bleak and lifeless atmosphere. Working together for the first time since Intersteller, McConaughey and Hathaway work well with one another, even at times when the material is lacking.

As with many examples of noir, one of the most interesting aspects of the film is its conflicted moral compass. Lost in his own pain and alone, Dill lives in poverty in a repurposed metal shack. His boat is owned by the bank and he can barely pay his first mate. He spends his days chasing his own ‘white whale’, a mysterious giant tuna that constantly escapes him. Named ‘Justice’, the tune is symbolic of the very justice that seems to elude him as he moves from day to day looking for hope to no avail. Though the island is beautiful, what begins as an Edenic paradise soon reveals itself to be anything but. (Case and point: The local tavern bar even changed its name from the ‘Hope and Anchor’ to the ‘Rope and Anchor’, citing that there isn’t much hope on the island.)

Still, in the midst of this dry moral time, Dill refuses to bend to Karen’s request. Despite the lawlessness of the area, Dill believes that there is something fundamentally wrong with the idea of killing anyone, no matter how hateful her husband may be. To him , there remains a dichotomy to life – light and dark, right and wrong – that continues to stand, even in the midst of a world of compromise. Inspired by the chance to be a father to his son, Dill fights hard against the pressures of the culture, even asking his first mate to ‘keep him from temptation’.

Even so, there is a sense of inevitability in Serenity that evil is constantly creeping in the background, waiting to strike. Can a man continue to try to be the man he wants to be, even when there is constant pressure to fall? Or does succumbing to our base impulses bring the justice that we’re looking for? These are ambitious questions for a film like Serenity and, without spoiling anything, the film’s twist reveals that this is also an ambitious film (perhaps tooambitious in that regard). Still, for those who are willing to take the ride and interested in the questions, Serenityis potentially intriguing enough to take the trip, despite its flaws.

Serenity is in theatres now.

Suburbicon: Neighbourhood Disturbance

by Leave a Comment

There goes the neighbourhood…

Directed by George Clooney, Suburbicon is a satirical look at the suburban world of the late 50s, as racial integration was truly beginning to break down social barriers.  The film tells the story of Garner Lodge (Matt Damon), a family man who lives with his wife, paralyzed as a result of a car accident, and adolescent son.  When a home invasion turns tragic, the Lodge family is thrown into turmoil.  However, as the truth begins to reveal itself, the family—and the neighbourhood—begins to unravel in unexpected ways.

Written by Joel and Ethan Coen, Suburbicon is filled with their signature brand of dark humor and violence yet Clooney very much puts his own stamp on the film as well.  Through his use of framing and lighting, the film might be the best example of 50s-style film noir in years.  What’s more, he wisely remains behind the camera for this film, resisting the obligatory cameo.  In doing so, he allows the script and cast to bring the film to life on their own, which they do so successfully.  Damon hasn’t appeared this menacing since The Talented Mr. Ripley while Moore plays the stereotypical housewife with a subversive edge.  (Meanwhile, Oscar Issacs almost steals the film in his brief cameo as an insurance adjuster.)

Clooney portrays Suburbicon as a city of ‘diversity’, yet the set design and entirely Caucasian cast remind us of the myth of that claim.  (This reality is emphasized from the very beginning through the film’s opening credit sequence, which hilariously mimics classic promotional films.)  This town is one that believes it has ‘bettered itself’ and has ‘opportunities for prosperity for all’ yet refuses to recognize its unspoken flaws.  Image is everything in Suburbicon but what happens when the seething cesspool of injustice and murder underneath begins to bubble to the surface?

In fact, one of the most interesting facets of Suburbicon is its interest in exploring racial tensions, without that narrative becoming the primary focus of the film.  By focusing on the gradual destruction of the Lodge family, Clooney somehow manages to allow the racial issues to gain prominence.  In other words, through its emphasis on the murderous intrigue, it is a reminder of how often the real social injustices of our culture get either swept aside or misplace blame.  Although it takes place in the late 50s, there is a timeliness and urgency to Suburbicon that give it a much-needed satirical bite.  It’s hard to watch Suburbicon and remain comfortable, which is to its credit.  The film knows what it wants to say and it does so efficiently and effectively.

But, if you decide to move there, just don’t drink the tea.

This year, ScreenFish was invited to the TIFF17 press conference for SUBURBICON! Narrated by George Strombolopolous, this revealing conversation includes director George Clooney, writer Grant Heslov, and stars Matt Damon, Julianne Moore and Karimah Westbrook.  You can stream the audio from the event here: