..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..RJ Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

A lengthy consideration of the sound and sensation in Bee Season leads off this week's Pride, Unprejudiced, along with the surprisingly sunny Pride & Prejudice, the predictably ribald Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic and a nicely restored print of one version of Michelangelo Antonioni's cosmopolitan caper, The Passenger.

From A to "Bee": Bee Season

Kentucky lacked a progressive spelling bee back when I was the age of the protagonist of Bee Season (***). If you won locally, there was no path to follow. Maybe it was just Webster County's fault, but in seventh grade somehow I could sense lachrymose and suss incertitude and gambol amid protozoa. I didn't know rules for spelling; it was almost entirely instinct or intuition plus autodidactic practice. For that reason, I'm sure, I tend to perceive titles of movies or books as euphonious constructions, more music than compacted literalism.

There's a boldness to Scott McGehee and David Siegel's direction of Bee Season that also partakes of this manner of free-disassociation, starting with its title sequence, and continuing with the bracingly oblique, quietly urgent, dazzlingly concrete sound and image that follows. These directors offer much to see and hear, starting with Flora Lewis' innocent pilgrim's face, as seventh-grader Eliza, a blue-eyed emissary of an otherworldliness inexplicably arrived from outside a clever family's embrace. Who is this stranger who does not yet know what it wants? Flora/Eliza watches: it's as softer, differently shaped edition of Philip Seymour Hoffman's rendition of Truman Capote. The filmmakers observe the observer in a passivity that is wolf-hungry for a world yet to be revealed.

Bee Season is adapted from Myla Goldberg's bestselling novel by Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal and directed by the Deep End team of McGehee and Siegel, and it's the kind of fluid, dreamy, yet tactile filmmaking that makes my day. "What happens when you close your eyes?" is a refrain, as daunting and unanswerable question as "What are you thinking?"

Set in a suburb of Berkeley, California, Bee Season is partly a study of a rupturing family, who live together yet apart, but it's also a sharp, suggestive collection of ideas about how we perceive language. How does the mind process and embed knowledge? Eyes-wide observer Lewis plays daughter to Saul and Mariam (Richard Gere, Juliette Binoche), a couple with unexamined pressures that have been building for years. Mariam, a biologist, is weary and distracted, wandering the city by night; Saul, a religious studies professor, is intense and often overbearing toward Eliza and her teenaged brother, Aaron (Max Minghella). Saul means well, but he's caught up in his own fixations of language as the "word of god," infusing his spelling-champion daughter with his obsession with the mystic Kabbalah. Lewis, with large, gentle blue eyes, kid-freckles and a cleft-chin is a vital presence as Eliza is presented as an eager observer whose perception of the world is slightly odd.

In the title sequence, the family, driving together in a car, is intercut with images of a stories-high letter "A" suspended from a helicopter, ferried over aquamarine water and blue skies like the Christ statue at the opening of Fellini's 8 1 / 2. At first glance, it seems like glib homage, but it's such a giddy image-clean, specific and indelible-but the bold symbol also immediately establishes the lyrical synesthesia that Eliza will experience in the transformation of language in her brain. When a word is spoken and as she speaks it aloud, what happens when she closes her eyes is a variation on photographic memory, bypassing symbol to become sensation. Eliza hallucinates language, in effect, causing her academic father to go a little mad, pushing her toward his notions of mystic revelation, Aaron has his own quest for redemption, found in the Hare-Barbie California-beaming smile of a cult member named Chali (played by Kate Bosworth).

Bee Season is so visual, so joyous, in its gleaming craft, it may turn out to be suffocating to some filmgoers. It'll be interesting to discover how many (re)viewers demand a different sort of story instead of piecing together how each of the characters are alike in struggling to communicate what accelerated, frayed-wire associations play in their overworked brains.

Bold filmmaking, subtle connotations, yet a conversation I had with the duo at the time of the Chicago International Film Festival was entirely practical, about how filmmakers ought to avail themselves of every possible device at their disposal to create the dreamscape of a movie. We talked about the exquisite sound design, which, for instance, includes foreshadowing of a major character's key secret through the isolation small jingling and jangling sound. (The interview, unfortunately, was conducted in a hotel bar, and defies transcription.)

As shot by Giles Nuttgens, light and reflection of light are as important as composition and shadow. There is a glassy hush to the contents of the frames I'd call apart from, yet akin to, late Kieslowski, and there are other coolly intelligent design choices, such as an allusion to a singular piece of sculpture: Cornelia Parker's "Mass (Colder Darker Matter)", which suspends in mid-air the charcoal from a church struck by lightning. "Mass" may be most transcendent piece of sculpture I've ever been able to revisit. (The reference will make more sense if you've seen the movie; to describe it any further would spoil an important moment.) Shadow and light, memory and hallucination are constant. While some of Eliza's visualizations of words don't work as well as others, there is a moment of graphomanic compulsion where she is encouraged to write without looking, to chart letters without lifting her pencil, and camera moves in close, closer, until we arrive at a microscopic fray of graphite that atomizes into spiky, small perfect letters, a little like the Avenir font, dancing in mythic, slow circles. In another, motes of light circulate like stars and fireflies.

McGehee, Siegel and Gyllenhaal make interesting use of spoken language as well, treating it almost as incantation rather than mere dialogue. In each of the bees that Eliza competes in, as the words are announced, then pronounced, then broken into letters by the competitors, the overlapping sounds come with the satisfying thump of poetry. "Daguerreotype… inchoate… suture… glissando." Much of the overlapping conversation in the household is luscious, and plays as speech, but doesn't make literal sense if you are listening closely.

This approach extends to design, as even wallpapers and carpets are striking without becoming obtrusive, but quickly characterizing a bit of personal space. There is a father-son fight at the foot of a staircase, and the heated moment is counterpointed by the genteel patterns behind their heads. Yet, later, even the sets come alive when the movie returns to the young girl's perspective, such as Eliza's fainting episode that leads to hotel room carpet Fleurs de Lys transforming into Hebrew letters. This is lush abstraction, yet it does not diminish the central story of the centripetal destruction of a not-quite-smart-enough family.

Let's get lost: The Passenger

Unseen for many years-through a complicated set of deals, Jack Nicholson wound up owning the negative back in 1986-The Passenger, (****) the 93-year-old Michelangelo Antonioni's 1975 thriller of modern dislocation remains quietly, hauntingly hypnotic. Nicholson nicely underplays a journalist named David Locke, drawn to war-torn countries-the film's original title was "Professione: Reporter" - who whimsically, "existentially," decides to swap identities with a man who dies in a hotel room down the hall from him in the sands of the Chadian desert. Following his datebook-which includes an entry for Tuesday, 11 September 1973-Locke visits Berlin and Barcelona, discovering that he is now in the shoes of an accomplished gunrunner. ("A pity about the anti-aircraft guns," a client murmurs.) Along the way, a nameless character played by Maria Schneider offers Locke help in his slow death, his escape from identity and disappearance from the narrative. In several minutes restored from Antonioni's unseen longer cut, Locke's wife searches for the "disappeared" man, adding extra levels to a story already densely woven with suggestive strands. The sound of wind and traffic and other effects on the soundtrack is muted, pared yet precise. As shot by Luciano Tovoli, the frames are unerringly precise, with even the fall of light from a just-cracked door in a desert hotel ripe both with beauty and implication. You can find yourself lost in The Passenger's cruel, gentle magnificence, yet it is also dryly witty, both in some formal flourishes-a roadside pause punctuated by a panning camera triggered by passing traffic-and its terse dialogue. "Now I think I'm going to be a waiter in Gibraltar," Locke tells The Girl. "Too obvious," she says. "A novelist in Cairo?" "Too romantic." Giving away the game, he says, "Maybe I'll be a gunrunner." "Too unlikely," she purrs in her charmingly implausible cosmopolitan accent. The lengthy final shot, which may or may not allude to Michael Snow's epic tracking shot, Wavelength, is justly famous. (For a lengthy, engrossing study of the film's history, read Robert Koehler's piece at Cinema Scope..

Pride & Prejudice: a sorority of girlish complicity

Joe Wright's brisk filming of Jane Austen's novel (adapted by Deborah Moggach) makes a snappy point in its third shot as Elizabeth Bennet (Keira Knightley), traipsing across a green field, snaps shut the book she's been reading. Some Toronto viewers objected to the speed of this Pride and Prejudice (***); others confess unslaked longing for Colin Firth's Mr. Darcy, from the 1995 BBC miniseries. Taken on its own terms, however, Wright's reading works with casual-elegant briskness, such as the early flurry of the Bennet sisters swept by giggles of gossip through their home, with the camera pulling back to perfectly frame the façade of the house: this is the center, the heart and hearth of our story. Wright and cinematographer Roman Osin make fine, ticklish use of sneaky, snaky zooms, lingering on one face or another during dinner or dance scenes, often catching, for instance, the exquisite, lovely, yet often off-kilter expressions of Knightley captured in teeming settings. Donald Sutherland as the Bennet paterfamilias is usually caught with comic, quizzical expressions as he observes his brood, the endlessly perplexing fauna played by Knightley, Jena Malone, and Rosamunde Pike. Pride & Prejudice is most adroit in its depiction of the sorority of girlish complicity. (Mum, as played by Brenda Blethyn, is suffocatingly shrill, which offers another reason to get quickly married away.) Matthew MacFadyen is another matter as Darcy, playing him as a man equally irritated and perplexed by social structures; he's mostly working the Clive Owen school of blue-eyed gloom. He seems more unschooled than confident, a man in the making, ready for Elizabeth's remaking. The camera prowls the interiors like a cat, sidling doorjambs and floorboards, even the turnings of chair legs. The camera inhabits these furnishings, to the point of recurrently viewing this idealized past through panes of rudely annealed glass, gradations of smear or blur as delicate in affect as the fluent zooms. I'm not sure how patrons of other editions of Austen's romance will feel, but I was captivated by the account of a world through gestures-smiles, frowns, harrumphs, beaming, wide-eyed instants of joy.

Sarah effing Silverman: Jesus is Magic

Oh Sarah fucking Silverman, loveliest affirmation of the contention that any subject is fair game for comedy, however dark, tragic and twisted, so long as it meets one criterion: is it funny? In the seventy minutes of Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic (***), there are a fistful of musical numbers and other sketches that showcase her vivacity, but diminish the core fifty minutes or so of the picture, which is the 34-year-old comic, alone, on a stage, with a microphone, her persona and tics, in front of an audience, keelhauling any taboo within reach. This is not a family newspaper, but this concert pic will likely elicit more iterations of that phrase than any in memory: "While scathing in her jokes about 9/11, Jewishness, racism, anal sex and more racism, Ms. Silverman's routines cannot be repeated in a family newspaper." The neat twist is Silverman's adopted comedian-persona is in how she takes her natural attributes-lanky, gorgeous-not-beautiful, charming-but-twisted, intelligent-slightly-nasal-and turns each and every tic and hesitation into a form of sly "Fuck me? Fuck you" aggression and still play knowingly at being a feral minx. (A female Rolling Stone interviewer called Silverman "a Jewish Cameron Diaz.") One joke'll do you: A couple nights ago, I was licking jelly off my boyfriend's penis… and I thought, Oh, my God-I'm turning into my mother!'" More with the price of a ticket and the laundry bills after one or more spit-takes of your sody-pop.

November 11, 2005

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