Canada’s Next Generation: The Art of Speech

A little post-modernism can be a dangerous thing. Here it is wielded like a club. Ironically, the protagonist, Koroviev would be well-equipped to crack down on such abuses, as the instructor in Quebecois poetry for Montreal’s newly instituted poetic-police. His interest in New Left cultural figure Pierre Maheu causes unforeseen complications in Olivier Godin’s The Art of Speech (trailer here), which starts streaming this Thursday on MUBI, as part of their series, Canada’s Next Generation.

Koroviev wears an eye-patch, drinks coffee, and refuses to sit down—ever—because of the potential damage it might cause his pancreas. His boss, Margerie (a.k.a. “The Singing Policeman”) has recently come out of a coma and is already back on the job. Koroviev’s latest assignment is surveilling Clement, a hipster of interest.

He was supposed to just watch Clement in next Margerie’s door office, through a hole in the wall. However, he quickly just invites himself over when he learns his subject has a connection to Maheu. Apparently, Clement owns a country bungalow where Maheu was lived. It is now inhabited by the sister of Coriandre, a platonic friend of Clement. Koroviev will be quite taken with her when he seeks her out. His boss Margerie also enjoys calling to serenade her late at night.

Tonally, Speech feels very odd, because it tries to marry goofy whimsy with knowing postmodern gamesmanship. The upshot is viewers are constantly taken out of the story by both low-end humor and high-end deconstructive mischief-making. There is literally something to irritate and confuse everyone in this film.

Nevertheless, there are several scenes that are quite clever when considered in isolation. Yet, the best aspect of the film is the soundtrack, featuring licensed music by Steve Lacy and solo performances by actor-musician Adam Kinner. In both cases, we are talking about the avant-garde at its most accessible: the unadorned tenor and soprano saxophone, raw and plaintive and ever so expressive.

With his eye-patch and dark suits, Michael Yaroshevsky is certainly cinematic-looking as Koroviev. As his namesake, Adam Kinner is only seen performing on-stage, but he sounds great. Frankly, Michel Faubert’s Margerie quickly starts to annoy the rest of us just as much as he does to Koroviev, but Jennyfer Desbiens is strangely haunting as Coriandre. At first, Etienne Pilon’s Clement merely seems like another nauseating hipster, but he takes an indescribably weird turn in the third act that he largely sells. It is like a riff on Shakespearean comedy, but more contemporary and random.

By now you should have a very good idea whether Speech is your cup of tea, unless you are a Steve Lacy fan with conventional tastes in all other respects. This film sounds terrific, but it is too cute for its own good. Offering more frustrations than rewards, The Art of Speech is really only meant for the post-structuralist elect when it premieres this Thursday (8/16) on MUBI.

Zoom: Hip and Self-Referential

Think of this film as Pirandello’s Möbius Strip. The looping narrative gamesmanship is clever, but the horny hipsters we could do without. Form duly trumps characterization in Pedro Morelli’s Zoom (trailer here), which opens today in New York.

Emma is an aspiring cartoonist working a day job in a prosthetic sex doll factory, but in her evenings, she writes her graphic novel about the sexual escapades of Edward, a seductive Hollywood leading man, who has just directed his first film about Michelle, a Brazilian model struggling to find her artistic voice by writing a novel about Emma, an aspiring cartoonist, but you already know the rest. Everyone’s lives continue much as they always have until Emma vents some of her recent resentments by suddenly reducing an important part of Edward—and we’re not talking about his personality here.

The reduction comes at a particularly bad time for Edward, because he needs to seduce Marissa, the new studio head if he wants her to release his art film about Michelle. Originally, he intended it to end on an ambiguous but empowering note, but he loses artistic control when his frienemy Horowitz is brought in to reshoot the ending. Thus the narrative cycle is soured by a chain of bad karma.

The third act pay-off might be clever enough to redeem all the annoying smarminess that came before it. At the risk of sounding prudish, Zoom would have been much more interesting and considerably more fun if there had been less sexual content and more self-referential dot-connecting. Frankly, all the business in the naughty prosthetic factory brings back bad memories of the mannequin warehouse in the ridiculously overrated Maniac remake. To put it delicately, we really don’t need to see Alison Pill and Tyler Labine (Dale in Tucker and Dale vs. Evil) having afternoon delight-time together.

Ironically, the most amusing performances come from Jennifer Irwin and Don McKellar, who are rotoscoped (a la Alois Nebel and A Scanner Darkly) in Edward’s animated sequences. The similarly ‘scoped Gael García Bernal might be slightly too convincing as the sleazy Edward. Pill and Labine are pretty shticky as Emma and her toy factory boss, but at least they register more than Mariana Ximenes’s bland Marina and the awkward-looking Jason Priestley underwhelming as her jerky rich boyfriend.

Zoom has real ambition, so many viewers will be frustrated when they do not like it more than they were hoping. There is just too much TMI. Inspiring dramatically mixed and contradictory feelings—and a knife’s edge 2.5 rating, Zoom opens today (9/2) in New York, at the Village East.

NYFF ’12: Night Across the Street

Don Celso Barra is one of those film noir paper-pushers.  Waxing nostalgic, he is fully aware of his approaching retirement, in every sense, including the most permanent one.  Language and narrative will be twisted like pretzels in Raúl Ruiz’s final film, Night Across the Street (trailer here), which screens as a main slate selection of the 50th New York Film Festival.

Don Celso studies poetry with French expat Jean Giono (who seems to bear little resemblance to his Horseman on the Roof novelist namesake), with whom he has struck up a friendship of outsiders.  Over coffee, Barra tells the poet stories of his childhood, featuring characters (including Long John Silver) who inject themselves into the ostensive reality. 

Barra lives in a colorful boarding house worthy of a Chilean Tennessee Williams and works in a soul deadening office.  At least he still has his health, but not for long.  Barra has foretold his own death at the hands of an assassin acting out of passion rather than for mercenary reasons.  Is it a delusion, a foreshadowing of things to come, both, or neither?  It will be dashed hard to say with certainty, as Ruiz and Barra play their games with the viewers.

Indeed, it is tempting to conflate the auteur and his final protagonist.  Though Ruiz began development on Lines of Wellington (also screening at this year’s NYFF), it was his widow Valeria Sarmiento who ultimately helmed the film after his passing.  As a result, when Barra foretells his own death, it takes on obvious additional resonance.  Still, it is impossible to invest too much biographical significance in Street, given the eccentricity of Barra’s story.  With its Séances, the ghosts of Beethoven, and an excursion into the afterlife, it kind of has it all, but not necessarily in logical order.

The late great filmmaker leaves us with some amazing parting images, but viewers might want to leave a trail of breadcrumbs.  It is easy to get lost in Street, especially since Ruiz’s leisurely pace does not exactly propel you along.  Still, Sergio Hernández projects the morose elegance perfectly befitting the unprepossessing Don Celso.

Sad yet playful, Street is like Inception for the art-house crowd.  While Ruiz over emphasizes the childhood flashbacks at the expense of the noir elements, his control of mood and atmosphere are always masterful.  Recommended for Borges readers (but not what you might call general audiences), Night Across the Street screens tomorrow (10/7) at Alice Tully Hall as part of the 2012 New York Film Festival.

Postmodern Canada: You Are Here

When is a room not a room?  When it is a Chinese translation machine, of course.  However, it has no conscious awareness of what it is translating, because it is just a room.  Let the epistemological-ontological-linguistic games begin in Daniel Cockburn’s unabashedly cerebral genre-straddling narrative You Are Here (trailer here), which opens today at the ReRun Gastropub Theater in Brooklyn.

A New Agey Lecturer immediately puts us on notice not to passively accept the images put before us.  Then Cockburn introduces us to Alan.  More than a man of the masses, Alan is the masses.  More accurately, his is the collective conscience of a crowd.  Some of Alan’s members are tracking operatives, who guide field agents around the city for no apparent purpose.  Their paths will cross the Archivist, a woman compelled to collect and catalog mysterious documents, VHS cassettes, and reel-to-reel tapes that seem to seek her out.  She will be our protagonist.  This might not be immediately evident, but the press notes assure us it is so.

But wait, there’s more, including the Experimenter, who creates a prototype of John Searle’s “Chinese room,” a hypothetical construct purporting to illustrate the limits of artificial intelligence.  Putting himself into the “machine,” the inventor responds to passages of Chinese (which he does not understand) by utilizing step-by-step reference books, replicating the computer’s translation process in the physical space of the cell, without any understanding on his part.  Eventually though, this system break down.  However, the Inventor perfectly realizes his scheme, forever altering mankind’s perspective on the world with prosthetic eyes.

You Are Here really is a narrative feature, but you would be hard-pressed to prove it to some viewers.  Episodic by nature, Cockburn’s film is fragmentary, hop-scotching all over the place.  Indeed, Cockburn’s background in experimental-installation and short filmmaking is readily apparently in his narrative approach.  However, there is a there there in You Are Here.  Unlike say James Franco’s Francophrenia, Cockburn respects his audience, presuming a high level of sophistication that will appreciate his philosophical gamesmanship.

Stylistically and intellectually, YAH’s most successful arcs follow the Experimenter and the Inventor.  In fact, their modular feature sections could easily be lifted out of the film and presented as rewarding self-contained shorts in their own right.  While the other braided strands are less focused, Tracy Wright dramatically humanizes the film as the Archivist.  In one of her final screen roles before tragically succumbing to cancer, she resolutely eschews quirk, conveying the profound frustration of one seeking meaning in a randomized universe.

YAH bills itself as a meta-detective story, but that rather overstates the mystery elements.  If Alain Robbe-Grillet rewrote The Matrix, jettisoning the kung fu and narrative cohesion, it might look something like this.  Though not every arc fully plays out, its ambition and inventiveness are impressive.  Recommended for those well versed in analytic philosophy and post-structuralism or simply inclined towards cinematic puzzles, You Are Here opens today (5/11) at the ReRun Gastropub in Brooklyn.  Graciously recognizing the film requires a bit of unpacking, ReRun will not charge for repeat screenings.