From time to time, I will try to do justice to movies that
have come and gone without being adequately appreciated. Mike Figgis’ Timecode
has been floating around the preview circuits for the past few months, and most
of what I heard about it was unfavorable. It’s been described by its promoters
as “part of Figgis’ daring evolution towards the ultimate in minimalist film
production ….The film was shot in one day entirely with hand-held digital video
cameras in sequence, in real time, with no editing. The plot-a black comedy
thriller set against Los Angeles
lifestyles-literally unfolded before the cameras as the actors each
forged an improvised trajectory for their
characters based on the central elements of an affair, a murder and an
ensuing Hollywood mystery.”
Now that I have seen Timecode
for myself, I can understand why previous viewers have had a problem with the
experience, and yet I found the movie interesting almost in spite of the degree
of experimentation involved. That is to say that there is something in the
content that is more compelling than the form. And here I am functioning as an
auteurist with a vengeance, in that I have been following Mr. Figgis’ career with
great interest ever since his first feature-length film, Stormy Monday , in 1988. Mr. Figgis not only wrote the
screenplay for this British transplant of an American gangster movie, but also
composed its jazzy background musical score. And he has been mostly on the
cutting edge of noir melodrama since, with such dark works as Internal Affairs (1990), Liebestraum (1991), Mr. Jones (1993), The
Browning Version (1994), Leaving Las
Vegas (1995) and One Night Stand
(1997). In the course of his career, Mr. Figgis has blended a finely tuned
eroticism with subtly impending violence.
Timecode ,
unfortunately, shows little of his subtlety or fine tuning. Everything goes way
too fast on the four square frames shown simultaneously on the screen as four
separate locations populated, generally in close-up, by an array of
intersecting characters more or less involved in the movie business. What is
described in the promotion as an “eclectic ensemble of actors” consists of
Xander Berkeley, Golden Brooks, Viveka Davis, Richard Edson, Aimee Graham,
Glenne Headly, Andrew Heckler, Holly Hunter, Danny Huston, Patrick Kearney,
Elizabeth Low, Daphne Kastner, Kyle MacLachlan, Mía Maestro, Leslie Mann,
Laurie Metcalf, Suzi Nakamura, Alessandro Nivola, Zuleikha Robinson, Julian
Sanders and Steven Weber. Don’t ask me who plays which role. As it is, my
companion and I were nudging each other all through the movie with such
whispered questions as “Is that Holly Hunter?… No, the one in the right
corner.”
The main characters are a movie executive played by Stellan
Skarsgård; his wife, played by Saffron Burrows; and Salma Hayek as an
auditioning actress balancing a lesbian relationship with a jealous woman
(played by Jeanne Tripplehorn) and the casting-couch exigencies of the movie
business. But the women are much more prominently identified than the men, and
only gradually does Mr. Skarsgård become involved in the action. I cannot say
at this point in my frantic moviegoing schedule whether repeated viewings of Timecode would yield aesthetic dividends
in the form of less eye-darting confusion. I am not sure that Mr. Figgis
expects or desires multiple viewings to get his point across. Frankly, I don’t
think he’d get repeat customers even if he wanted them. There’s not enough
snap, crackle and pop in the spectacle for such presumption.
Yet strangely, perhaps
perversely, I sort of liked Timecode -or
at least I appreciated what Mr. Figgis seemed to be saying. I think he is onto
something about the contemporary Hollywood lifestyle and about modern life in
general. His methods, so perplexing at first glance, seem appropriate for
characters with short attention spans, infinite self-absorption and
inexhaustible narcissism. Much of the time his characters seem to be moving
around haphazardly, and there are long interludes of silence in one or more of
the boxes. There are no back stories, and only very shallow backgrounds. Thus the scope of the film is very narrow,
but within its parameters Mr. Figgis achieves a sense of real time during which
nothing much is happening except on an inexplicably interior level.
Toward the end, Mr. Figgis stages an oddly comic parody of
his own potentially pretentious explication of his style. I began chuckling,
but not dismissively or derisively, because he was not sending up the whole
enterprise; the four-cameras-four-boxes rigor remained. Time did not have a
stop, and the one climactically violent act left behind a mesmerizing trail of
blood.
In the realm of fictional narrative films with live-action
cinematography (a realm in which I have chosen to specialize), attempts at
being completely different usually involve subtracting something from the usual
run of movies-or, in other words, making a movie with one hand tied behind the
director’s back. Past examples include Russell Rouse and Clarence Greene’s The Thief (1952), which dispensed
entirely with dialogue; Robert Wise’s The
Set-Up (1949), in which the events occur in real time, thus honoring
Aristotle’s unity of time (though foregoing his unity of space through
montage); Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope
(1948), a faux one-take exercise that makes its transitions in black while
eliminating montage; and, of course, Dogma 95, which forbids all sorts of
things in the name of an unmannered realism.
This kind of stunt cinema
seldom changes anything in the long run, and each example rises or falls on
factors other than the presumed and publicized innovation. Timecode is no exception to this rule, and if it rises, as I think
it does, it is because of the continuity of Mr. Figgis’ morbid vision through
the years.
Picasso, Admired and
Animated
Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso ( Le Mystère Picasso ) was completed in
1955 and shown to the public for the first time at the 1956 Cannes Film
Festival. The ever-unpredictable festival audience reportedly rejected the film
with a vociferous display of hostility. A second screening with the 75-year-old
Picasso in attendance was greeted more politely, and the film itself was
honored by the festival with the Prix du Jury.
But why was the festival
audience so upset by the film? Was it a simple case of philistinism in action?
Or, less likely, was it a hypercritical outburst at a onetime genius who had
passed his prime? Did people object to the didactic mixture of painting and
film? Now that the Film Forum has revived The
Mystery of Picasso with a new 35mm print, we can decide for ourselves.
Clouzot (1907-77) was
also a controversial figure in the French cinema: His career actually began in
1942 during the German occupation of France with a slick thriller entitled The Murderer Lives at Number 21 , and
continued with The Raven (1943), a
misanthropic film about a poison-pen rampage in a French provincial village.
The fact that the film was backed by a Nazi-run film company, and allegedly
shown in Germany as anti-French propaganda, resulted in Clouzot’s six-month
suspension from filmmaking after the Liberation. Picasso also worked
undisturbed in Paris during the Occupation, but no one seemed to criticize him
afterwards. The embarrassing ironies of Marcel Ophüls’ The Sorrow and the Pity (1971) did not surface until 1970, a
quarter of a century after the first hypocritical flush of a belated patriotism
among the bulk of the collaborationist French populace. Be that what it may,
Clouzot enjoyed international success with Wages
of Fear (1953) and Diabolique
(1955), both no less misanthropic than the controversial The Raven back in 1943.
Clouzot, however, found new enemies on the staff of Cahiers du Cinema , most notably François
Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, though their objections were more aesthetic than
political. Still, both made an exception for The Mystery of Picasso , with Truffaut raving: “The film is about
poetry and we feel overwhelmed by it …. A work by Picasso created before our
very eyes! That is a miracle which, if need be, would justify the greatness of
cinema.” Godard was no less enthusiastic: “The only interesting film Clouzot
has made is one in which he was seeking, improvising, experimenting, one in
which he lived something: Le Mystère
Picasso .”
Ariana Huffington, in Picasso: Creator and Destroyer , raises a
provocative distinction between the two artists: “There were all the trappings
of adventure in the Victorine Studios: sweat, tension, excitement, exhaustion;
the buzzing, booming confusion of soundmen, gaffers and assorted technicians;
the sepulchral tones in which Clouzot announced his intentions while feverishly
sucking on his pipe: ‘My intention is to make a pedagogical film for those
interested in art.’ ‘And to think that I wanted to make a cartoon,’ sighed
Picasso.”
For myself, there were many moments in the film when
Picasso, the cartoonist, prevailed over Picasso, the pedagogue. Whatever else
Picasso was, he was clearly the greatest draughtsman of our time. To watch his
sure strokes creating worlds enmeshed in contrast and conflict is to watch the
Kurosawa of painters somehow incapable of the
metaphysical serenity of the Mizoguchi of painters, Matisse. But that is
a matter of personal taste.
I can’t imagine anyone with any interest in any art passing
up an opportunity to see The Mystery of
Picasso . The question of where it stands in the world of cinema is somewhat
more problematic. Perhaps it is not one thing or another, but a fluid mixture
of both Clouzot’s creative tribute to Picasso’s artistic genius and Picasso’s
desire to introduce his painting to the world of animation.
