My Night at Maud's (Eric Rohmer, 1969)

Eric Rohmer's My Night at Maud's, a personal favorite, is a singularly lovely and infinitely rich film. Made in 1969, the third of his Six Moral Tales, despite the title Rohmer gave to the series of films beginning with 1963's The Bakery Girl of Monceau and ending with 1972's Love in the Afternoon, is not a moral tale in the sense of having a specific lesson to teach. The film, instead, takes the time to carefully observe the actions of its characters, particularly the protagonist (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a thirty-four-year-old engineer who recently took a job at the Michelin plant in Clermont-Ferrand. In the first few scenes, we see him--the character's name is never mentioned, so we'll just call him Jean-Louis--attend mass (he is a practicing Catholic), where he catches a glimpse of a beautiful, blonde girl (Marie-Christine Barrault), and at that moment decides that she's the one he's going to marry.

Elsewhere, he works on mathematical problems, chats with his colleagues about their plans for the winter (Christmas is near as the film opens), and picks up Pascal's Pensées at a bookstore. The next night or so, he runs into an old friend, Vidal (Antoine Vitez), as he enters a restaurant. They haven't seen each other in fourteen years, and the conversation teasingly ranges from the probability that the two of them would meet in Clermont-Ferrand (Jean-Louis explains that it is impossible to calculate since neither of them knows where the other lives or works) to the modern relevance of Pascal's Wager, which, as a Catholic, Jean-Louis dismisses as mathematical hope, while Vidal, a Marxist philosophy professor, takes as cue to assume that history is not meaningless. It is at this point that I should interject with something of an assertion that, despite the way that I am describing the "action" of the film, My Night at Maud's is never monotonous or uninteresting. Rohmer famously cares a great deal about the dialogue in his films, but that doesn't mean he's any less attentive to the visual aspect of his work than, say, Bresson. For one thing, Néstor Almendros's luminous black-and-white photography turns the city of Clermont-Ferrand and its surrounding provinces into a distinctly cinematic space that is always a marvel to look at. Also, Rohmer's ability to craft scenes of considerable length is something deeper than just a good ear for narrative and dialogue, as is importantly the case with the centerpiece of the film, an extraordinary, forty-minute sequence on which the success of the film hinges. After midnight mass on Christmas Eve, Vidal convinces Jean-Louis to accompany him to the house of a friend, the charming and enigmatic divorcée Maud (Françoise Fabian), a pediatrician every bit as articulate as her two guests. The three, while also taking the time to drink and eat dessert, mostly converse; about Jean-Louis's Catholicism, which strikes both Vidal and Maud as a bit odd, about Pascal, whom they've all read but understand in different ways, and about love affairs, both of the past (Vidal recalls Jean-Louis's mistresses) and the present (they both assume, correctly, that Jean-Louis is in love at that very moment, probably with a blonde). The brilliance of this scene and of the film as a whole is to be found, perhaps, in the fact that none of these three subjects--religion, philosophy, love--is mutually exclusive. In My Night at Maud's, the matters of the spirirt, the mind, and the heart can't ever be truly separate (as Jean-Louis makes explicitly clear several times); they have to coexist in the same person and inform his or her decisions at any given moment.

After spending the night at Maud's (and I don't think I'm spoiling anything by mentioning that nothing happens between the two), Jean-Louis runs into the blonde, a twenty-two-year-old biology student named Françoise, and they agree to go out to lunch together the next day after mass. Now, it's already enough of a coincedence that he ran into her not long after leaving Maud's apartment, but that same day, after coming back from a trip to the mountains with Vidal and Maud, Jean-Louis sees Françoise again and he offers her a ride home, which, as it happens, is close to where he lives. Jean-Louis, a believer in some sort of predestination, often remarks that his choices have always been easy, that he's been lucky in this sense. Without saying too much about the way the rest of the film plays out, I should mention that this interaction between chance or luck and the choice to live one's life according to rigid moral stances makes the ending of the film one of the most moving I've ever seen.

Man on Wire (James Marsh, 2008)

James Marsh's engaging documentary Man on Wire (2008) tells the story--and what an incredible story it is!--of tightrope walker Philippe Petit, a jovial and animated Frenchman who recounts his experiences with such vividness that he brings them to life with just as much force as Marsh's consistently striking images. The film focuses on one particular instance of Petit's career: the dense and foggy morning of August 7, 1974 where he, after having broken into the World Trade Center with his collaborators the previous night, proceeded to walk back-and-forth for some forty-five minutes on a wire suspended between the two towers.

The structure Marsh utilizes in Man on Wire is quite simple, but suitable for his purposes here. In addition to recounting the events of August 6 and 7 with precision and detail, he includes in the first part of the film background information about the construction of the World Trade Center (which Petit first became aware of while in a dentist's office at age 17), as well as of the past conquests of Petit and his associates (including Notre Dame and the Sydney Harbour Bridge). Most miraculous, perhaps, are the depictions of the interactions between all of the people involved in the planning of le coup--a young, enthusiastic group drawn into and enthralled by Petit's vision. Marsh's use of footage from the time (some of it in color, other in black-and-white, all stunning) bring to his interviews the added dimension of all the years that have passed.

Petit's was truly an amazing achievement, and one from which Marsh fashions not only a loving and witty tribute to the unparalleled artistry of his subject, but also a very moving rumination on the wonders of the human imagination.

Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, 2008)

Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy (2008) opens with a tracking shot following its title characters--the one a lonely drifter beautifully played by Michelle Williams, the other her dog--as they make their way across a field in an Oregon town. There is some light humming in the background, and this is one of the only moments of pure joy in a film that is otherwise interested in cataloguing Wendy's dire economic situation. After she tells a few people gathered around a fire in that same field that she's heading to Alaska ("I hear they need people there," she says), one of them, a guy with a painted face named Icky (Will Oldham), mentions a fishery up there that she should visit. She spends the night in her car, only to be waken up by the parking lot security guard (Wally Dalton), who tells her that she can't sleep there. Her car, meanwhile, won't start.

From then on, Wendy, facing one perilous situation after another (she gets caught shoplifting, she loses her dog), wanders around town in escalating desperation. Reichardt captures it all in brief, observational moments, and it is this lack of pretense that ultimately makes the film so moving and in many ways heartbreaking. On another level, even as Wendy and Lucy works remarkably well as an intimate portrait of its place (the Pacific Northwest) and time (now), it also subtly evokes aspects of American mythology that have been dwelled on by artists as diverse as Jack Kerouac (On the Road [1957]) and Jim Jarmusch (Dead Man [1995]). Yet, what makes Reichardt's project all the more interesting and layered is that while she's in some sense dealing with the idea of the frontier in a very topical manner, she's doing so by harking back not only to an American tradition, but to that of Italian Neorealism, and I'm thinking specificially of films like Vittorio De Sica's post-war masterpiece Umberto D. (1952), another work about living without a sense of economic stability.

Reichardt's deep awareness and unquestionable talent have allowed her to craft a film that is honest, patient, and calm. Williams's amazing and restrained performance forms, in Wendy, a character that never feels inauthentic. There's a beautiful moment toward the end of the film where the security guard, who has come to care for and help Wendy more than anyone else, hands her seven dollars and tells her to take it without arguing. The look on Wendy's face there, filled with such gratitude by this gracious gesture after so much despair, is a much more eloquent statement about the film than I could write.

A Charlie Brown Christmas (Bill Meléndez, 1965)

The 1965 TV special A Charlie Brown Christmas is such a staple of the holiday season that it seems more than a little arbitrary, not to say fruitless, to try to weigh in with an opinion about it. Everyone has seen it countless times, which means that unless you're writing a polemic against it (and, for the record, I'm not), there's really not much anyone can do by way of recommending it. With that said, I still feel it's useful to say something about the way this beloved, twenty-three-minute animated short from more than forty years ago can tell us something about the world today, or at least with regard to how we watch movies.

As created by Charles M. Schultz, the Peanuts comic strip is even more ubiquitous than the TV specials (of which the Christmas one is undoubtedly the finest) it spawned. The spirit of the original source material finds it way into A Charlie Brown Christmas through the screenplay penned by Schultz, with its dispersed yet poignant dialogue setting the pace for the action. The story, such as it is, deals with Charlie Brown feeling disillusioned by his lack of enthusiasm for Christmas, a celebration he admits to not fully understanding. He gives psychoanalysis a shot, paying Lucy a nickel to help with his crisis, but all it gets him is a laundry list of phobias, leading him to conclude that he is afraid of, well, everything. Sensing that Charlie Brown didn't really get his money's worth, Lucy goes on to suggest that he should direct the Christmas play at the school, a position he happily accepts. Now he'll finally have the chance to do something worthwhile, something to take him away from the crass consumerism he's surrounded by--even his dog and his sister have been swept up by this wave.

Underscoring Charlie Brown's struggles with his views on Christmas is Vince Guaraldi's timeless jazz recording, equal parts elegant holiday cheer and painful childhood nostalgia. It's no wonder Wes Anderson used one of these tracks (the vocal version of "Christmas Time Is Here") in the lovely ice cream parlor scene in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) between Royal, the distant father, and Margot, the troubled daughter. And, in the end, it's this sense of achingly beautiful sadness--accentuated not only by Guaraldi's music but by the characteristically simple visual style of the film as directed by Bill Meléndez--that stays with the viewer long after Charlie Brown and friends have fixed up the flimsy Christmas tree he had picked out for the play. The film, by not looking to preach tired old values in the most crude and obvious way possible or even fool us into giving up our money at the box office to sit through another vapid hundred-million-dollar Hollywood blockbuster, reminds us of the pleasant and noble things about Christmas, which is to say, those that have nothing to do with Christmas as such whatsoever. In short, A Charlie Brown Christmas is a film even a secularist can love.

In the City of Sylvia (José Luis Guerín, 2007)

"The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough."
- Ezra Pound, "In a Station of the Metro" (1913)

José Luis Guerín's lovely and mysterious film In the City of Sylvia (2007) is in many ways primarily concerned with the act of seeing people. Not only does the main character--a handsome, long-haired remnant of the Romantic era played here by Xavier Laffite--spend the first part of the film sketching various women at a cafe in the European city he's visiting (Strasbourg) and the second following one of them around town, but at times the camera itself appears to be just as captivated simply watching people, taking in all of their mannerisms with such attention that it becomes difficult to draw any distinctions between an objective and subjective gaze.

The film opens with a series of static shots of a hotel room: an unmade bed; a nightable littered with various objects; and a window with a faded white, slightly cracked frame that is characteristically European. A title card reads 1st Night, but the first time we see the main character is the next morning, as he's sitting on the bed, legs crossed, pencil in hand, staring off into space. A minute or so passes before he scribbles something in his notebook. He makes his way out of the hotel and walks around, intently looking at his map, as though he's searching for a very specific location, and ends up sitting down at a cafe that is largely empty--another woman sits two tables away from him reading a paperback book and dozing off, and he calls out to her ("Excuse me? Are you from here?"), but she doesn't respond. The next day he returns to the cafe, but this time all of the tables are filled. This first extended sequence is something of a magnificent film in and of itself. Guerín lets us observe all of these people, sometimes from the point of view of our hero, who sits in a corner sketching, but also in a much freer way wherein we are able to take in the sheer beauty of the scene (including some evocative music and elegant use of slow-motion) as well as some of its quiet comedy (there's a running gag where the waitress keeps bringing people the wrong orders).

After spending some time staring, drawing formed but vague sketches of several women, our hero zeroes in on one particular woman (the extraordinarily beautiful Pilar López de Ayala), the one he may be looking for, who he sees through a glass window into the cafe. She gets up to leave and he, spilling his beer while getting up in a terrible hurry, decides to follow her. He does so for the next twenty or so minutes, the heart of the film, and Guerín films it all in a knowing and otherworldly manner. The use of Steadicam is quite astonishing, calling to mind the best of the work of Béla Tarr. Natasha Braier's photography is also inspired, turning the city of Strasbourg into a gorgeous labyrinth at once familiar and utterly fantastic. Most notable, perhaps, is the intricate sound design. Little by little, the sounds of shoes hitting cobblestone streets, cars and the metro zooming by, and the accordion of a street musician form a kind of street symphony that goes a long way in giving Guerín's film its form.

From the time we realize that our hero believes he knows this woman (at one point he calls out "Sylvie"), a certain tension arises regarding when or if he'll get to actually talk to her and find out whether or not she is, after all, the woman whose city he is in. But since Guerín seems to be making a more general statement about male obsession (a subject tackled in a brilliant, albeit different way in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo [1958]), this isn't a film where there could be any resolution. What there is, however, is a slight change in our hero. He eventually does directly confront the woman, only to find that she's not the Sylvie he met in Strasbourg six years prior, although it's clear to us that while he's disappointed, he's also fascinated by this mysterious woman. That night he goes to the bar where he had met Sylvie, one last, ultimately unsuccessful attempt to find the girl he's after, and the next day he sits at a metro station near the cafe, looking over his sketches (some of which, importantly, are of the "fake" Sylvie).

Ezra Pound, in that short poem with which I began this piece, describes an image, that of a man who has seen several beautiful faces and is trying to find the words to describe that sudden emotion, for this is what the artist does. He keeps his distance and, to use Pound's phrase, finds a way to get this through "in little splotches of colour." Our hero, after having directly followed his muse through streets and alleys, recedes into the state of an artist. Sitting at the metro station, just as Pound did all those years before, he sees the girl again, and for a moment it's clear that he's contemplating getting up and starting all over again, but he remains sitting. The wind blows through the pages of his notebook, through his writings and his sketches and the maps he has drawn, everything he's worked on there in Strasbourg during those last three days, and he knows that whether or not this is Sylvia's city, it will always be his.