Silver Screen Streak Round 2, List #01: TSPDT 21st Century

Flickcharted: #5393 (16.06%)
1 pass spent; passes remaining: 3

I’ve had mixed success with “slow cinema,” an aesthetic that has become hyperpresent in the international arthouse scene during the last 25 years. There are films in which a patient, languid approach communicates something very specific about a quiet setting, the contemplative characters, or a stubborn narrative. And then there are the movies that use it as a crutch, artificially prolonging moments with false pregnancy, or simply padding the clock to stretch a short film subject into feature length. Often, the directors of this latter type of “slow cinema” show promise as still photographers who have failed to adapt to motion pictures. They seem to think that letting the camera linger for an extra few minutes on either side of an evocative still image innately adds something. I disagree.

Colossal Youth (2006) is a painstaking two-and-a-half hours of a broken former revolutionary stalking the bleak slums of Lisbon like a ghost. That actually sounds like it might be interesting — what if, decades later, the actual result of a romanticized activism was living aimlessly in ruins, the husk of one’s former idealized self? I suppose the benefit of director Pedro Costa’s slow cinema is that it provides ample time to consider better versions of his movie, as his characters shamble around, slowly moving through a frame, or just sitting inorganically silent for minutes on end, or engaging in aimless and excruciating monotone small talk. Costa’s hushed world is poverty viewed through an NPR-fetish lens of the noble savage.

Typical of the filmmaking in Colossal Youth, there’s a scene in which Ventura, the film’s central character (playing some version of himself, apparently), enters a stairwell in a dilapidated building and walks up a flight of stairs. While elderly Ventura ascends the stairs in 10 seconds, Costa’s camera holds on the peeling paint of the staircase wall for an additional 15 seconds. The solemn tone makes each second feel like 10, but it does answer the question: What is more boring than watching paint dry? Paint drying is, at least, dynamic; try watching a wall that hasn’t been painted in 50 years, and only because even the editor fell asleep. And now imagine 156 minutes of that. Maybe these aging revolutionaries should pick up a paintbrush and do something useful to improve their world in the present.

Flickcharted: #3915 (39.69%)
1 pass spent; passes remaining: 2

I seem to have hit a rich vein of “slow cinema” in this list, with Silent Light (2007) providing more of the same. At the very least, Reygadas is attempting a narrative here, as Johan, a Mennonite living in Mexico, “struggles” with urges of infidelity — and the bucolic farmland setting lends itself to slow pans of landscapes and long shots of farm activities. Still, very little happens within this 2-hour-plus drama. Johan’s struggle is spoken more than it’s observed; there’s no tension: he just goes ahead and does whatever he wants, and then through some deux ex machina plotting followed by some magical realism, gets let off the hook for it. It’s hard to tell what Reygadas is getting at here, narratively, but he does have a pleasing eye. I liked his film Our Time (2018) better, as it had more naturalistic performances, which seemed in sync with his unhurried camera. In Silent Light, however, the artifice of “slow cinema” is too obvious — often the seemingly amateur actors seem to be uncertainly waiting for instruction to speak in the film’s unnatural rhythm, and this awkwardness shatters any spell that the deliberate pacing wished to create. A curiosity, with moments of lyricism, but ultimately confounding.

Flickcharted: #4940 (23.98%)
1 pass spent; passes remaining: 1

I might have waited too long to write this review, as this movie is incredibly unmemorable. To be fair, I've had that reaction to all three of the Apichatpong Weerasethakul movies I've seen so far. The narrative experiment on its own is interesting: it tells the same story twice — if you can call it a story, of two doctors, a man and a woman, who work together and marry — but neither version of these events is ostensibly meaningful. Perhaps the director, as he has said, made this film about his memories of his parents, but not only are they not his memories, they simply aren't interesting. Seen twice in repetition with only minor variation, they are even less interesting. It's like watching a holiday slide show from someone who wasn't on the trip and only vaguely knows the destination. Unlike the other two Weerasethakul films I've failed to appreciate, this one also has no memorable images.

Flickcharted: #3420 (47.39%)
1 pass spent; passes remaining: 0

I quite enjoyed both Jia Zhangke’s Platform (2000), which was an earlier selection from this list, and his more recent Ash as Purest White (2018), which I watched recreationally. Still Life (2006) was a comparative dip in form, at least technically, as the disappointing use of digital video is distractingly ugly when it seems like there might be beautiful images in this if given any care. Maybe that’s an intentional metaphor for China itself: a nation that wants to appear appealing and modern, but which is really a low-trust society of swindlers and tribal antagonists living in slums, their families broken by an inept infrastructure and the supposed push for progress? These ideas are at the height of their poignancy during the demonstration of a $240 million bridge, an engineering marvel that is only allowed to have its lights turned on when important people are looking. "Mao dreamed it, you made it happen!" Indeed. There are certainly interesting notes here and there, and, as usual, Jia’s muse, Zao Tao, is terrific… but this meandering movie doesn’t quite seem to pull its ideas together into anything satisfying. I also don’t really find Jia’s obsession with shoehorning bad UFO special effects into his arthouse thinkpieces very compelling. In this case, at least, it just looks silly.

Flickcharted: #3799 (41.58%)
This streak is over.

Blissfully short at 81 minutes, Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) is a slice-of-life capturing one night at a Taipei movie theater presenting the kung-fu classic Dragon Inn (1967). Or maybe it's a pastiche of several nights, as there is no continuity in terms of the size of the audience or where anyone is sitting. It doesn't seem like anyone is there to actually watch the movie, except for a small child. The adults seem to be there for gay hook-ups or... honestly, director Tsai Ming-liang keeps information to a minimum, so there's very little other character motivation going on. This is a vibe movie, I guess, but it takes its time, and its vibes are low-wattage. There is no dialogue until the 44th minute, and a good three minutes are devoted to a man taking the world's longest recorded piss. "Slow cinema" often presupposes that life, to be captured honestly, must be not only patient but excruciatingly languorous, so when a movie like this fails at narrative naturalism in terms of spatial continuity and the length of time one might spend at a urinal, it really calls the whole enterprise into question. I do like movies set inside movie theaters, so that probably satisfied me more than this deserves.