Year 2007 in movies (part 2)

5. Paprika

In our content-saturated world, media is our new religion, advertisements our new icons for veneration. Instead of images as sacred intermediaries to another reality, there is now a constant attack of images on our psyche that we don't pay much attention to. The result is a merging of reality. Where in the past, dreams become the repository for images that we see, now real life is so filled with these images that its quality has become almost dream-like without us noticing.

In Paprika, characters dive into billboards, jump through video camera lenses, merge into paintings of classical mythology. "Don't you think dreams and the Internet are similar? They are both areas where the repressed conscious mind vents, " says Paprika, the eponymous red-head girl who is the dream alter ego of the real life Dr. Atsuko (or is Atsuko the alter ego of Paprika? Chuang Tzu's butterfly dream is repeated several times in eerily sinister ways), in a conversation on the internet that is portrayed as being as real as reality. With animation, you never know which reality is real, because they are all unreal. The internet, TV, and perhaps more primitively, cinema, are all outlets where the world dreams collectively. Chuang Tzu's dream in our modern age is multiplied like endless reflections between two mirrors. Our realities have become so fractured and fragmented that the modern man is never just one person anymore; reality is not just blurred, the concept of reality is altogether irrelevant.

There is a sleep condition called 'lucid dreaming,' which refers to the state of being fully conscious while dreaming. While knowing that he is in a dream, the dreamer is in full control of his dream, becoming God temporarily, able to manipulate and mold reality to his wishes. From my own experiences, this is possible up to the point where the dream regains control of itself and imposes something extraordinary - often nightmarish - on the dreamer. That is the point where the dreamer tries to shake himself awake; but this is often difficult, and the dreamer is trapped inside his own nightmare, unable to escape. Satoshi Kon (and perhaps also novelist Yasutaka Tsutsui) must be familiar with this, because although it is often funny and exuberant, Paprika is also terrifying in this way. Although now, it can be said, our waking life has become our playground for lucid dreaming. We are all lucid dreamers; one day our reality will regain control, and we would be trapped in a nightmare of our own making.


4. The Duchess of Langeais (Don't Touch the Axe)

Getting to like a new filmmaker is just like learning a new language - it always seems incomprehensible and impenetrable at first, and after the initial awkwardness of learning a few words, you soon begin to know what to expect, and then subsequently you can just slip into it as comfortably as you would with other languages.

It is altogether humbling when a filmmaker who began his career more than 50 years ago, and who influenced countless of filmmakers, is still making films as powerful as this today. The Cahiers crowd glorified the power of mise-en-scène in their criticism, but none of them - none - has perfected the much-feted concept as well as Jacques Rivette. Rivette's films are each a palpable reality, at once enigmatic and oneiric, his figures move around the frame as corporeal entities in a dance with the camera.

Having seen Catherine Breillat's The Last Mistress around the same time, I was naturally more immediately drawn to Breillat's acute psychological realism. Though both deal with sexual politics that play out like theater - the novels on which they are based on are the stages on which the drama is played - both films are as different as waking life and dream. It might be useful to compare both films to see the merit of Rivette's film - ultimately it will be Rivette's that haunts your mind. I will now try to find reasons for this.

Breillat's film gropes for (and grasps) the reality of the characters' games by depicting them with an accurate feel for the social and psychological milieu, due, in large part, to some dazzling acting by Asia Argento; in a sense, she locates the reality of the characters within the stage of the tragedy. Rivette's film, as many of his films do, strains for the reality that lies elsewhere, beyond psychology and society, perhaps in a realm of spirituality, or perhaps it is a realm that is not even spirituality anymore. Breillat's film locates the metaphysical through logic while Rivette's film is squarely located in the metaphysical. If Breillat's film, like Italian Renaissance art, uses precisely constructed geometric perspective, then Rivette's film is like the Flemish Renaissance, where perspective and space is intuitively felt. Breillat makes you understand the metaphysical, but Rivette makes you feel it.

To look at how Rivette does this would warrant a lot more words, and I'm probably the least qualified to do this, even more so when I've yet to see much of his important work (Out 1 and L'Amour Fou to say the least). There are two scenes in this film, however, that are perhaps the most affecting I've seen in cinema this past year, and they are worth pointing out. Both are pivotal scenes in the story, and what Rivette does with them using cinema is incredible. One is a scene in the middle of the film that marks its turning point. In Balzac's original novella, the scene is written with a frank brutality, a raw realism that makes it almost like rape; in Rivette's film, however, this becomes a scene that hovers on the edge of consciousness, still brutal and nightmarish, but at once immediately physical and oneiric at the same time. The other scene is the film's ending - a pan to emptiness, the horizon, like the 'dash' in writing, disappearing into infinity, into speechlessness and silence.