Two Lovers (2008)

Minggu, 13 Desember 2009

Two Lovers (2008)

Two Lovers (James Gray, 2008)

The opening sequence is vital. The requisite black of the opening credits gives way to a cloudy gray sky, which is partially covered by the back of a man's head. A lone gull slowly flies across the frame and it punctuates the gloomy atmosphere, an atmosphere that is predominantly supported by the deafening rhythm of an unpredictable breathing. We essentially feel what Leonard Kraditor (Joaquin Phoenix) feels after what seems to be an unfair turn of events. Director James Gray momentarily removes us from Leonard's perspective, and from a safe distance, we see the character, bowed down in contemplation, walk, arbitrarily drop the freshly dry-cleaned clothes he was carrying, climb the railings of the bridge, and jump into the sea. Gray brings us back to Leonard's perspective: a struggle of air bubbles in the cold seawater; a piercing memory of a perfect love that turned out to be imperfect; a glimmer of light in the distance and indistinct shouts from the surface. Leonard is eventually rescued, walks away from the crowd with hardly an expression of gratitude to his saviors.

Leonard is all at once a very familiar and unfamiliar man. From the safety of a cinematic distance, his case seems unique: a suicidal thirty-something man from Brooklyn who after another failed attempt at ending his life, suddenly falls in love with a new neighbor, who is herself in love with a married man, while entertaining possibilities of romance with her father's business partner's daughter. However, Gray insists on depicting Leonard as an everyman, a personification of our own stubborn insistence on the fantastical notion of the existence of a grand romance, a figment of what we used to be or what we refuse to believe that we are. That is why the opening is vital. It is what invites our eyes to see the world through Leonard's incongruently hopeful and jaded point of view. The opening does that as it establishes a connection: that more than being approximated how it is to live like Leonard, we are approximated how it is to nearly die like Leonard. This is a connection that is enough for us to understand him notwithstanding the novelties of his circumstance: that he lives with his parents; that he is volatile; that his current predisposition is utterly unsatisfying considering that he is loveless, lifeless, and works for his father's dry-cleaning business when he fancies himself an artist.

The dilemma that Leonard has is hardly gargantuan, although to him and probably the rest of the uncynical world, it probably is. In a curious twist of fate, he is given two avenues to repair his romantically battered soul. Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the daughter of Leonard's father's business partner, is your typical girl, the type that suddenly springs in your life with hardly any fanfare, although she starts to grow on you, but never enough to personify a lifelong fantasy. Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), on the other hand, the new neighbor who is troubled by her married lover's inability to fulfill his promise to leave his family for her, is that fantasy girl who, although seemingly disinterested in a romance with you because of several reasons, is far too close to ignore or forget. Gray paints Leonard's dilemma with the casualness that is striking and oftentimes, heart-wrenching. Gray's camerawork, precise in its deliberate movements, fluttering through the interiors of Leonard's apartment or in and out of the brick pillars of the building rooftop, exemplifies an earnestness, a quiet sincerity that gives the intertwining relationships an emotional resonance that is simply too palpable to discard. In that regard, the tender moments, such as Leonard's attempt to kiss Michelle while she is sleeping or the prelude to Leonard and Sandra's lovemaking as backdropped by black and white portraits of Leonard's ancestors and opera that sprung out of Leonard's frustration to win Michelle's affection, are devastatingly beautiful, ravishing brush strokes that complete a masterwork of a painfully real document of the randomness of romantic affection.

Leonard's family is a lingering presence. His familial ties, through the several generations of Kraditors hanging in the apartment, the unavoidable pull to partake in the family business, the Jewish traditions, pervade his intentions to find and gain the love of his life. His father (Moni Moshonov) and mother (Isabella Rossellini), laid-back yet utterly concerned of their son's emotional condition, insist on a hold on him, sneaking behind his locked door to get an inkling of what he is doing and manufacturing opportunities for him and their anointed girlfriend so that they can get together despite his subtle protestations. Leonard, with his indelible familial attachment and his insistence on betting everything on a fantastical appreciation of love, is essentially a man-child, a Brooklyn variation of all the adult yet childish men that have populated Hong Sang-soo's love triangles and who in their drunken and sex-desperate stupor, have dissected the basic intricacies of sexual relationships. Phoenix's Leonard however, with Gray's preference for melancholy and dolor over Hong's deadpan humor, is a particularly moving creation, a man stuck in his unevolving imagination, delighted and fanciful of the fleeting ecstasy of an undefined romance: communicating with Michelle via phone, with the added value of seeing each other through their connected window views; showing off his skills in the dance floor; and charming her friends through his stories and raps.

Thus, the film's conclusion, devastating if viewed from the perspective of a hopeless romantic, gives way to probably the film's truest moment, at least for Leonard. After reeling from a realization of his overboard folly, he returns to his family nest and quietly proposes to Sandra, the girl who represents everything he is escaping from like family, his Jewish traditions, his father's beloved dry-cleaning business, and a life of abject ordinariness. He is rewarded a tender embrace; as Gray's camera follows his face and Leonard suddenly gazes at us, discarding the supposed distance, the object of escapism that cinema was meant for. That peering gaze, laced with a tinge of guilt, an acknowledgment that he knows that we know, a surrender to a real world that consistently rids itself of confused dreamers, is not unique in the film; as Michelle, while on the rooftop after Leonard's heartfelt declaration of love to her, similarly looks directly at the camera as she surrenders herself to Leonard after her realization of the impossibility of being with her married lover.

The gaze mystifies. It bothers. It disturbs because it's just too damned honest. Two Lovers, with its illusion-breaking gazes, its deliberate pacing, its primary use of a suicidal and lovesick man's painfully hopeful perspective, and its atmosphere of colorable melancholy, is, depending on one's readiness to be abruptly made sober of the intoxicating consequences of an infatuation with romance and picture-perfect happy endings, a work of undeniable power. It will lead you on, then break you completely, before curing you back into the banal comforts of this real world.

We Own the Night (2007)

Rabu, 07 November 2007

We Own the Night (2007)

We Own the Night (James Gray, 2007)

James Gray's We Own the Night is so deceivingly simple that it is very easy to dismiss it, which is what most of the mainstream critics who have seen it did (the film got scathing disapprovals in Cannes where it held its premiere). Those who approved of the film liked it, but didn't like it enough to round up a resounding admiration for the film. There are a few, now including me, who thinks its a tremendous film, a triumphant feature for Gray (his third film, previous efforts include Little Odessa (1994) and The Yards (2000), in more than a dozen years) and probably one of the year's best.

Gray greets us with a photo montage set into motion by a very laidback yet alluring jazz score. Against the rippling chords performed by the virtuosic trumpet, sepia-toned photographs of New York's police are displayed: a discreetly placed revolver, a violent arrest, money and drugs seized, and a proudly displayed cop badge, beaming with its elusive yet very real power, truly seductive.

The next scene is even sexier: Amada (a dazzling Eva Mendes who surprises with her ability to play such a very strong female in what essentially is a guy flick) lying in a couch, her body partially covered by a few pillows and a revealing outfit, and her fingers on her crotch, subliminally inviting her boyfriend Bobby (Joaquin Phoenix, who is always good) to dig in, which he does. He foreplays with her for a bit before he is called to his work. Bobby is living the life as manager of the El Caribe, an infamous haven for the nightstalkers of the eighties and the Russian drug mob. It turns out that he's son to the police chief (Robert Duvall as Burt Grusinsky) and brother to a newly appointed captain (Mark Wahlberg as Joseph Grusinsky); his true identity is unknown to his shadier friends as he has long abandoned his paternal family name, Grusinsky to adopt his mother's maiden name, Green, a common last name that would erase any possibility of tracking down his pedigree. It would be logical for him to follow the path laid to him by his family and enjoy the jazzy allure of cop life, but between that and Amada's crotch accompanied by that fascinating life within the fringes between the law and the underground, he chooses the more enticing of the two, obviously the latter.

We Own the Night, its title derived from the New York police's slogan during the eighties, is set during the height of the police's ongoing war against illegal drug trade. Gray's gritty period piece, complete with anti-gravity hairdos for the ladies and loose nightclubbing outfits for the guys backgrounded by leftover disco hits from the late seventies and the early eighties, is faulted for its screenplay written also by Gray, an ordinary cop tale supposedly mired by inconsistencies, implausibilities and contrivances. I don't buy it. Gray's script harkens to a Hollywood that believes in classic stories of men, oft-repeated but never replicated, where the inherent psychological and moral turmoils overtake the purported importance of originality and realism. In the middle of the bigger backdrop of cops chasing drug dealers is a soothing and subtle emotional parable of two brothers, long divided by separate paternal figures (Bobby has ever since adopted his Russian club owner as surrogate father) and a gargantuan difference in their worlds (in one sequence during Joseph's promotion, Bobby enters the function hall, lackluster compared to the dance halls of the El Caribe; the enormity of their separation is evidenced by that sequence's final moments when Joseph gives out a speech on his comrades' heroics, and Bobby and Amada walk through the darkened staircase, and drowns the speech with a torrid kissing session).

Fate, or that force that would stretch New York's moral spectrum (the worsening drug trade which starts to use the clubs as starting points for their operation, pinning Bobby in the middle) is thinning the fringes that separate the law and the underworld, making it impossible for Bobby to remain satisfied in the middle. This would force the brothers closer.

Gray's screenplay commends that inherent familial duty, that blood bond that has kept Russian emigres consolidated whether they are on either side of the moral spectrum, as the impetus for Bobby's rapid change; as can be seen when his brother becomes the target of the Russian mob causing him to blur the once-permanent lines that allow him a semblance of comfort and stability or when his father sacrifices himself to save him (in a masterful car sequence; dutifully edited with the sound of the swiped sweeping off the rain from the windshield as pulse to the fluidly directed car chase), dictating him to abandon the gray zone, he is far too in it (the gray zone can no longer provide the safety and comfort it once so easily provides, he either has to be a sitting duck or an active participant) too remain in the middle, and as his father predicted before, he would have to choose whether he is with them or with the law. Amada, a figurehead of the past but is also very human and stays on with Bobby not for anything else but for that sheer hope that love can pull them out of their present rut, is also faced with that choice, to either push through or separate.

Gray paints the picture so boldly with several instances of blatant masterstrokes (the car chase in the rain, the shootout in the coke house, the final showdown in the grassy fields), probably confusing people to consider such hurried decisions as plot contrivances rather than complex psychological touches; but there are compelling bases, these are as irresistible and uncontrollable as the grooves of destiny and familial ties. We Own the Night is a brilliant piece of work, perfectly controlled and defiantly against popular notions of how cinema should move and feel. Despite its somewhat rebellious tone, it flaunts a classic scenario so dauntlessly and effortlessly told its hard to deny that it's good, really good.