Daily Archives: Wednesday, January 13, 2016

  • Keep the Lights On

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ira Sachs (2012)

    This is a movie by a gay film-maker about a gay film-maker who is making a movie about a gay film-maker.  (In describing Ira Sachs as a gay film-maker, I mean that he’s an openly gay man whose films not infrequently feature gay protagonists and lifestyles.)  Erik Rothman, the main character in Keep the Lights On, is a young Dane living and working in New York City.  In the early part of the movie, he’s making a documentary about Avery Willard.  The latter was a real person: in 2012, In Search of Avery Willard, a documentary short by Cary Kehayan, screened at several provincial American film festivals a few months after Keep the Lights On premiered at Sundance.  The IMDB summary of Kehayan’s piece calls Willard ‘one of queer art’s most elusive innovators. Broadway photographer, physique artist, gay activist, experimental filmmaker, drag historian, leatherman, pornographer’.  He was, according to IMDB, the creator of ‘a lifetime of historically significant work that has remained widely unseen for decades’.  In Keep the Lights On, Willard’s work is described as ‘a visual anthropology of the gay scene in New York from the 1940s to the 1990s’ (although one of the contributors to Erik’s film also expresses the view that Willard’s work, while unique in its time, wasn’t of high quality).  The interaction of three creative sensibilities – Sachs, Rothman and Willard – is potentially interesting but Keep the Lights On doesn’t exploit this imaginatively.  The Avery Willard aspect of the story isn’t much more than queer culture decoration.  The film-within-the-film on Willard wins a Teddy award (as Keep the Lights On also went on to do) but Erik Rothman, as written by Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias, might as well be an accountant as a documentarian.

    Sachs’s focus is on the relationship, over nearly a decade, between Erik (Thure Lindhardt) and Paul Lucy (Zachary Booth), whom Erik meets through a phone sex hotline.  Their story comprises four chapters – set in 1998, when Erik and Paul’s affair begins, 2000, 2003 and 2006, when they part company for what appears to be the last time.  We learn that Erik had, and ended, at least one long-term relationship prior to Paul.  This was with a man called Paolo, who was diagnosed as HIV-positive.  Since Paolo, it appears that Erik has preferred casual sex with different partners.  The new relationship with Paul changes all that but, while it’s different for Erik, it is, for the viewer, a familiar movie relationship.  Erik, who shifts quickly from promiscuity into possessiveness, is repeatedly frustrated by the inconstancy of his lover.  It’s never easy to understand what Erik finds so compelling about Paul, a lawyer with a serious drugs habit.  As played by Zachary Booth, he’s little more than a pretty boy:  Booth’s Paul blows not so much hot and cold as bland and chilly.  Thure Lindhardt as Erik is a very different matter (and the only good reason for staying with Keep the Lights On).  Lindhardt is rather odd-looking – wide-hipped, gap-toothed and goggle-eyed – but he is charismatic, and he’s some actor.  (He was superb in the third series of the Danish-Swedish television police thriller The Bridge, screened on BBC4 in late 2015.)  We’re told that Erik had his first sexual experience when he was thirteen years old:  Lindhardt gives the character a boylike quality that somehow keeps reminding you of this.  His Erik is credibly different in his interactions with people in different parts of his life – his phone sex interlocutors, his trusted friend Claire (Julianne Nicholson), his elder sister (Paprika Steen).  One of the better moments in the film comes late on, in a conversation between Erik and Igor (Miguel del Toro), a painter whom Erik met at a gay club earlier in the story.  Erik is startled when Igor says that he always gets tired of a partner after a few months.  Lindhardt registers the sense of shock so convincingly that he makes you believe, in this moment, how much Erik has changed in the course of his and Paul’s on-off-on relationship.

    It’s probably neither a coincidence nor Thure Lindhardt’s fault that he is least convincing in the crucial scenes with Paul.  This may be partly because Zachary Booth gives Lindhardt little to play off but I think the blame attaches principally to Ira Sachs.  It came as no surprise to read on Wikipedia that Keep the Lights On ‘is based on Sachs’ own past relationship with Bill Clegg, a literary agent who published his own memoir about his struggles with addiction’.  Here is another example of an autobiographical, or partly autobiographical, movie in which the material is inherently and powerfully meaningful to the film-maker – who, as a result, is blinded to the need to work that material into something with dramatic energy.   Sachs’s co-writer Mauricio Zacharias doesn’t seem to have been able to help with this.  There are several sequences that go on for some time and in which very little appears to be happening:  these scenes probably say plenty to Ira Sachs but they’re inert on screen.  The paintings of nude male figures over the opening titles (by Boris Torres, to whom Sachs is now married) and the repeated bouts of ‘strong sex’ (to quote the content warning for the film) give Keep the Lights On the look of bold gay movie-making but, below that surface, this listless film isn’t any more challenging than its 2014 successor, Love is Strange.

    2 January 2016

  • I’m Not There

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Todd Haynes (2007)

    You need to be well informed about 1950s Hollywood to appreciate Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven and, to a lesser extent, Carol.   Perhaps it requires a good knowledge of the life and music of Bob Dylan to get much out of I’m Not There – an unusual biopic, in which the Dylan protagonist is portrayed by six different actors.  I don’t have that knowledge but I don’t think this is my sole reason for finding I’m Not There a tiresome movie.  I saw it on its original release and decided to give it, like Far from Heaven, a second try at BFI this month.  I got more from Far from Heaven this time around.  I’m Not There was still as up itself as in 2007.

    In the Weinstein Company’s press notes for the film, Todd Haynes is quoted as follows:

    ‘The minute you try to grab hold of Dylan, he’s no longer where he was. … Dylan’s life of change and constant disappearances and constant transformations makes you yearn to hold him, and to nail him down.  … Dylan is difficult and mysterious and evasive and frustrating, and it only makes you identify with him all the more as he skirts identity.’

    This protean quality is the basis, then, for the multiple incarnations of Dylan in I’m Not There, which Haynes co-wrote with Oren Moverman.  Five of the alter egos are played by Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Ben Whishaw.  The other two Dylans are more intriguing – at first sight, anyway – because they’re not white men but a fourteen-year-old African-American, Marcus Carl Franklin, and Cate Blanchett.  Christian Bale plays both Jack Rollins, the ‘protest singer’, and Pastor John, the Dylan who became a born-again Christian.  Richard Gere’s character nods to Dylan’s role in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973).  Heath Ledger’s Robbie Clark is an actor who becomes a star playing Dylan in a screen biopic.  Ben Whishaw is Arthur Rimbaud, supposedly a strong artistic influence on Dylan.  Marcus Carl Franklin’s Woody is named for the similarly influential Woody Guthrie.  Cate Blanchett plays Jude Quinn, the Dylan who controversially moved from acoustic to electric guitar and toured Britain in the mid-1960s.

    This is a long film although, the way it’s structured, it could go on for much longer than it does.  Fortunately, Todd Haynes calls it a day after 135 minutes, when the movie has come full circle:  the oldest incarnation of Dylan departs the scene and the youngest, with whom the film started, reappears.  This isn’t, however, a chronologically ordered narrative.  At this distance in time, I’m Not There seems kin to the time-splintered Iñárritu movies of last decade – both in the basic structure and in the dependence on that structure to make things livelier (although, in this case, that’s not lively enough).  None of the Dylan lives in the film is sufficient in itself even for twenty or so minutes of continuous screen time.  The only one that develops is the Robbie Clark element and ‘development’ is something of a euphemism:  it’s worked out as a conventional price-of-fame marital drama.  (The Robbie Clark material is different too in that Charlotte Gainsbourg, as Robbie’s wife, has a significantly bigger part than any non-Dylan character in any of the other elements.)  The bits of the movie that were easily comprehensible to me were also ones that stuck out as particularly crude – like the horrified reactions of Dylan’s traditional fans to his playing electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival.  (One of these fans is played by a man affecting a very terrible Scottish accent.)

    Few of the performers leave much impression.  I’d forgotten that Christian Bale and Richard Gere were even in the film.  Marcus Carl Franklin ensures an attention-grabbing start to proceedings but is soon virtually dropped (until the very end).  Heath Ledger is uneven although the layers he gives the character of Robbie Clark are, in the context of this movie, very distinctive.  It’s rather pleasing that Ben Whishaw’s and Cate Blanchett’s hand movements echo each other but Whishaw is otherwise effortful.  I’m Not There came pretty early in his screen career and he seems anxious in the exalted, starry company he’s keeping here.  It may not have made things easier that, unlike the other principals, he’s always filmed sitting down and facing an unmoving camera.  Unlike her male co-stars, Cate Blanchett makes almost too much of an impression. Her Dylan impersonation is ingenious but it holds your attention because it’s ingenious.  The actress’s skill overshadows the character she’s created – to such an extent that, when the real Bob Dylan, playing a harmonica, appears briefly on news film near the end of I’m Not There, you may for a split-second think he’s doing an impression of Cate Blanchett’s Jude Quinn.  (Haynes interleaves a good deal of archive film into the narrative.)

    The most impressive contribution after Blanchett’s comes from Bruce Greenwood, as Keenan Jones, a British journalist who investigates Jude Quinn.  There’s a good sense of Jones getting under Jude’s skin – a dream sequence revenge-of-sorts is queasily striking too.  (Greenwood also plays Pat Garrett in the Billy the Kid element.)  Jack Rollins’s story is told in clips from a faux-documentary about him.  The interviewees include Julianne Moore as Alice Fabian, one of Rollins’s former collaborators.  Moore comes across less as a talking head in a documentary than as an actress playing a talking head in a faux-documentary.  Whether or not that was Todd Haynes’s sophisticated intention, I was conscious of feeling content when Moore was on screen because I understood that Alice Fabian was Joan Baez-inspired – and because I’m Not There is, to a large extent, a Bob Dylan spot-the-reference quiz.  Most people in the BFI audience probably got a much higher score than me.  I still detected a hint of relief in the laughter that greeted the appearance on screen of figures as easily identifiable as the Beatles and Allen Ginsberg (David Cross).

    28 December 2015

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