Oct 182013
 

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If only it were as simple as Julie Andrews would have it and we could just “start at the very beginning” because, of course, “it’s a very good place to start.” But in terms of narrative, there is always for me the pressing question of where to begin. I carry a few principles with me I have learned from various teachers and from trial and much error.

1. Walk in late.

2. The end is in the beginning.

3. Show the audience how to experience (love) the story.

The trick, then, is to keep these things in mind but, as Andrew Horton reminds us in Writing the Character-Centered Screenplay, “Remember you wish to draw the viewer into your world, but you don’t want to drown him or her in the first ten minutes” (159).  Easy peasy.

The odd thing about beginnings is how often they are forgotten. When I’m teaching and asking students about the first frames of films, they often reference later plot points more than the actual first shots. Roland Barthes, in his A Lover’s Discourse, points out that there is no love at first sight.

I never fall in love unless I have wanted to; the emptiness I produce in myself . . . is nothing but that interval, longer or shorter, when I glance around me, without seeming to, looking for who to love . . . Yet the myth of “love at first sight” is so powerful  . . . that we are astonished if we hear of someone deciding to fall in love. (190)

So how we do suggest, provoke, encourage the audience to want to fall in love, firstly. And how do we not falsely advertise, lure the viewer or reader in with the promise of a torrid and lurid affair only to promptly pull out the TV dinners and our sad house coats, narratively speaking?

The question of how to begin has been more recently preoccupying me with a film I shot last may, “zack & luc,” where I planned a beginning but lost it. I shot the film all on super 8 film which in this day and age is an exercise in desperate waiting for a hopeful outcome: you shoot the film, you send it off to the lab in another city, you then wait for the lab to develop it, send it to another place where it is scanned and digitized, and then months later your film footage and its electronic version arrive back and you see what you have (or don’t have). In our case, of the thirty-eight rolls of film, we were rather lucky that only one had some exposure to light and only one didn’t turn out at all. The problem that presented itself was that the footage on the missing roll was intended to be used for the first and last shots in the film. Because I believe the end was in the beginning, I lost both.

In the beginning,

The rain clattering against the windshield of the parked truck, the wipers forgetting then remembering to clear away the water. The lights of the cars driving by become clear then blurry, then clear, then blurry again.

And in the end,

Zack turns and opens the door and then he is gone, the cab filled again with the sound of rain on the glass. Through the windshield the world is dark and impressionistic, sparkled with the red and white lights of passing cars.

Perhaps I would not be so concerned with this lost beginning and ending if I wasn’t acutely aware that the stories I am interested in telling are a little high maintenance and thus a little hard to instantly fall in love with. In my short film scripts I am drawn to stories that are narratively challenging.  “alice & huck,’ directed by the wonderful Kaleena Kiff, tells the story of two characters who collide but mostly miss in various scenarios or universes, exploring the question of how timing plays into our possible romances.

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“zack & luc” is two versions of the entire story of a relationship, told for the one character on the right chronologically and for the other on the left frame in reverse chronology, so the first and last moment the two lovers are together are juxtaposed.

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Among other things, this non-linear story I think gets to explore that beginnings principle (“the end is in the beginning”) and how it pertains to relationships. Once you’ve loved and lost a few times, you look at beginnings a little differently. In writing both stories, I was aware that I had to find some way to coach the audience to watch the films differently than they would a realist or classical (typical Hollywood) piece.

A film that taught me a lot about beginnings was the Belgian film Une Liaison Pornographique (a fantastic title which was then rather confusedly and perfectly translated into the title for the American release as An Affair of Love, which betrays an American confusion around endings or love or both).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPksJ99XhT0

It’s a peculiar film: it tells the story of a man and a woman, both unnamed, who are being interviewed by an unidentified interviewer about a sexual act that the two met for but insist they will not disclose to the interviewer. There are a barrel of monkey questions that could easily undo the “love at first sight” state we might want to experience for this story: who is the interviewer? Why is he making this documentary? Since the two versions of the affair contradict, who is telling the truth? And what the hell were they doing in that hotel room anyway? Here the filmmakers had to create a difficultly achieved balance between building the audience’s desire and not creating so many questions that the viewer might be more attached to the questions than the momentum of the story. How to coach an audience to not over focus on the details? How to get them to go along with an improbable though compelling story?

In the case of Une Liaison, the filmmakers bracket the film with the same crowd footage you see linked above. We begin and end with this out of focus, impressionistically shot, crowd of strangers on the street. If you watch intently I promise you that you can almost see the woman and the man in that crowd; or do you? This is flirting; this is the possibility of love. Regardless, the opening, in the style of an impressionistic painting, coaches us to see what follows in a similar fashion: to see associatively or impressionistically. One could look at a Monet painting and just look at the brush strokes but then one would be kind of missing the point.

Other films embrace the same principle with different methods. Tom Tykwer‘s Run Lola Run has an ominous clock followed by a similar crowd scene that emphasizes and introduces its themes around time and the interconnectedness of people.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet‘s Amelie does a beautiful job of establishing its themes of connection and synchronicity and its tone of absurdity.

When it came to writing “alice & huck” I knew I needed a similar sign post declaring“Watch this way.” It presented itself in the swing and the clouds

That did not seem enough to signify the leaps between the various versions of how the two characters might collide, so I then wrote in a recurring impressionistic montage of body parts saturated in sunlight:

A world out of focus, what look like limbs, a mouth, a throat, 1 all blurry and impressionistic. breath and sighs. these
are the moments that bridge time and place, like puzzle pieces each time, but pieces to a puzzle all about the sky — no 
one can put this together.

This is what it translates into in the film:

With “zack & luc” I needed a similar sign post so the viewer would be prepared to watch loosely, associatively, patiently. The impressionistic beginning I wanted was that visual through the windshield in the rain. It had partly come to me from Lucrecia Martel’s “Pescados” (presented and written about by Sophie Lavoie right here on Numero Cinq at the Movies).

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There when the fish explain their dream where they go driving in the rain, we see footage of the highway through a windshield in the rain. This image stuck with me and seemed a perfect way to bracket the complicated story of “zack & luc.”

So when it no longer existed, when the roll was damaged, I had to decide how important it was. Then when I woke up two weeks later declaring to the ceiling that I needed the shot, I had to go about it. It took until the end of the summer for me to order in the film, book the camera and grab a handful of people to get the shot. I think it was a Tuesday night, in a friend’s driveway with a very long garden hose, but we got it.

It will be months still before an audience sees this beginning / ending and before I can really get a sense of whether these shots create a space for love. But I am hopeful and this is a good ending to the story where I lost my beginning.

— R. W. Gray

Feb 022013
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2g5EbHwKhHs

In Alice Winocour’s short film “Kitchen,” a woman struggles over the span of one day to bring to the table what “le mari” desires for dinner.  She idly asks him during their morning ablutions what he would like for dinner and he says, “whatever you want . . . not meat in any case.”

In an attempt to please him, “la femme” brings home to this rather drab apartment and this rather drab life two shiny oil-black lobsters with pink underbellies. They are terrifying. They are alien, set out in stark contrast to the bland colour palate of the apartment and measured by the woman’s horrified and frustrated expressions framed in uncomfortable medium to close portrait shots. Their primal, thick insect-like bodies seem made to writhe and spasm, a disturbing life-filled force compared to the stagnant marriage they have scuttled into.

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Dinner in this film is of course not simply dinner. It is the culmination of a relationship that has reached its tipping point. When the husband insists “not meat in any case,” he implies that perhaps married life has become a routine meat course. It forces the woman’s hand. She must struggle to find a new recipe.

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As the end credits note, no lobsters were harmed in the making of this film. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t some convincing violence against lobsters as the woman struggles to deal with these purchased but unwanted visitors and their valiant attempts to survive even if these are their last moments before dinner.

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Winocour mirrors shots in the film to make connections between the lobsters and the couple: the opening shot of the wife in the bathtub mirrors the shot where she at the end of the film seemingly sets the lobster free, before she seals his fate.

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It’s a solid film and it could reasonably end when the husband gets home. But it’s the final shot that tips this film over into the sublime. We see the woman as she struts towards the low angle, sidewalk camera and as she approaches the shot retreats, moves with her – we yield to her. She is not going to the market for meat instead of seafood. She is not getting take out pizza. She is leaving and we are going with her. Winocour makes a perfect song choice here scoring it with Madeleine Peyroux’s melancholy cover of Elliott Smith’s rock bottom “love” song “Between the Bars.”

This walk, as thrumming with intent as the lobsters’ thrusting tails, stands as both a beginning and an end and yet neither. It is an act unto itself and calls to mind other walks and runs in cinema. The title character in Zho Yu’s Train who runs after a train she cannot catch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsWudw-vTnA

Lola’s running in Run Lola Run.

Even the character Carrie’s walk away from a relationship in Sex and the City.

The woman’s walk in “Kitchen,” like the walks and runs above,  is an affirmation, an attempt, and a declaration. It is her only way out of the drowning drab of the apartment and the dilemma between a suffocating meat course and an impossible and traumatizing lobster feast.

Winocour has made three short films including “Kitchen,” and her first feature film, Augustine, was released last year. “Set in Belle Époque France, director Alice Winocour’s sensual, fiercely intelligent tale of female sexual awakening follows nineteen-year-old “hysteria” patient Augustine, the star of Professor Charcot’s experiments in hypnosis, as she transitions from object of study to object of desire” – TIFF

–R. W. Gray

Jan 192012
 

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Tom Tykwer’s “Faubourg Saint-Denis” tells the story of a moment of confusion between two lovers, Francine and Thomas (played by Natalie Portman and Melchior Beslon) where, briefly, the man thinks things are over and the relationship flashes before his eyes. The voice-over addresses the beloved in the second person, a love letter the audience intercepts, and the breathless montage recounts the varied history of these two lovers. It’s a love story of all the small moments, the screams, the tears, the laughs, the repetition of days.

It’s an excessive discourse that recalls other excessive expressions of passion: Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. And yet, in its passion and direct address, its lovely claustrophobia, maybe more accurately Pablo Neruda’s Captain’s Verses.

The film is intimate, excessive, and yet made up of an abundance of small moments that on their own might be insignificant. It’s the repetition of these small moments that makes up the pattern of the couple’s days, the accumulation of memories that shapes the intimacy here. As their history flashes by, the repetitions layer like a palimpsest, the images becoming part of a larger passionate body. “I see you,” says Thomas at the end of the film, as though this were only possible through the crisis and remembering he has just experienced.

Such passionate expression requires a talented hand. It’s difficult to distill so much dramatic history down into a short film without lapsing into melodrama or without drama turning into comedy. Tykwer seems to meta-comment on this here with the film within the film, the cheesy pimp and prostitute story that Francine stars in. When she calls Thomas back to figure out why he hung up, Francine asks him, “How are you supposed to say [it]  . . . without sounding completely melodramatic?”

Their story avoids melodrama through montage and the pure adrenalin of the piece. This is in a sense the polar opposite of the Wong Kar Wai offering a few weeks ago: where Wong lingers and hangs all granite gravity on an image in slow motion, Tykwer races past images like a water slide of vodka.

“Faubourg Saint-Denis” is one of the eighteen short films featured in Paris, je t’aime, an anthology of short films by several significant directors, each set in a different arrondissement of Paris. Other directors in the project include Gus Van Sant, Richard LaGravenese, The Cohen Brothers, Alfonso Cuaron, and Alexander Payne.

Tykwer has masterly told passionate tales before, matching star-struck and tortured romances with a sort of fairy tale sensibility: the questions of fate, free will and running in Run Lola Run; the innocence and violence of The Princess and the Warrior; the dark, damaged passion of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.

Tykwer, with The Matrix’s Wachowskis,  is adapting and directing David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas for the big screen (it’s listed as currently in post production).

—R. W. Gray

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