Posts tagged movie

Sin is Green 

Atonement (2007)
D: Joe Wright
S: James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Romola Garai, Saoirse Ronan, Vanessa Redgrave

Ian McEwan took all of three pages in his award-winning 2001 novel, Atonement, to narrate the painstaking, Goldilocks-like process aristocrat Cecilia Tallis goes through in choosing a dress for a formal dinner party in her family’s English countryside home in the summer of 1935. After trying on a black crêpe de chine dress, which she thought was somewhat funereal, and a pink moiré silk dress, which made her look like Shirley Temple, Cecilia finally chooses something that is just right: “She reached for […] her green backless post-finals gown. As she pulled it on she approved of the firm caress of the bias cut through the silk of her petticoat, and she felt sleekly impregnable, slippery and secure; it was a mermaid who rose to meet her in her own full-length mirror.” 

In the acclaimed 2007 film adaptation by Joe Wright, that mermaid, Cecilia, is portrayed by Keira Knightley, beautiful and regal as always, in a loosely fitting evening gown created by Academy Award-nominated costume designer Jacqueline Durran. The film, deprived as it is of the luxury of time, doesn’t devote a considerable amount of frames to the depiction of the pre-dinner deliberation Cecilia has with her wardrobe, but it does get the dress right. As in McEwan’s book, the dress which the sartorially inclined principal character picks in Wright’s Atonement is green and backless. Thanks to Durran’s expertise, it also bears the same effect to its wearer (making her feel “sleekly impregnable, slippery and secure.”), made evident as soon as Cecilia puts it on and its hemline drops to the floor. It’s a far cry from what she was wearing—or rather, not wearing—just a couple of scenes back, although, to be fair to her clothes then, she wasn’t about to attend a formal gathering. 

A couple of scenes back, Cecilia is about to fill a vase with water at the fountain near the Tallis mansion. On the way there she meets Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), the housekeeper’s son and a childhood friend of hers who, like Cecilia, is home from university for the summer break. For reasons not entirely unknown, reasons made more pronounced by the blazing hot weather, until this moment they’ve been avoiding each other. Walking toward the fountain, he in his gardening clothes and she in a diaphanous floral summer dress, they talk about her preference for Fielding over Richardson, then arrive at the subject of his scholarship under her father, at which point their conversation starts to feel awkward and delicate. At their destination he offers to help her with the vase, she refuses, he grabs the vase by its handle, she turns away, and just then a portion of the vase snaps and a fragment drops into the fountain. Furious, Cecilia strips down to her undergarments and goes into the water to retrieve the detached piece of porcelain. When she emerges, Robbie can only stare at her, wet and nearly naked. 

Through an upstairs window, the foregoing episode of attenuated desire is witnessed by Briony (Saoirse Ronan), Cecilia’s sister who, having only seen and not heard the encounter, fails to comprehend the circumstances of the couple’s unusual acts. And it’s not the only time that she does. Later in the evening, minutes before the dinner party, to which Robbie is also invited, Briony again becomes privy to a moment of intimacy between Robbie and Cecilia. In the home library, whose only source of illumination at the time is a small desk lamp, Briony sees—or thinks she sees—Robbie assaulting Cecilia, the latter seemingly splayed by the former against the bookshelves. In truth, the couple have just confessed their love to each other and have just begun making love—almost fully clothed at that, he in his sharpest black suit and she in her backless green dress, which proves to be slippery but not completely impregnable and secure—when they are discovered by Briony, in a simple dress so white as to hint of her supposed innocence and naivete. At night’s end, a crime that will take decades to atone for is committed, but it’s not Robbie nor Cecilia who’s responsible for it. On the contrary, they are the victims, and Briony, with her intense eyes and propensity for fabricating realities, is the unknowing perpetrator. 

It’s not hard to understand why a great deal is invested in perfecting that flowing green dress, on top of getting the other articles of clothing used in the film right and making sure that they lend an air of authenticity to the film’s different settings. That utterly divine gown symbolizes a number of things, not the least of which are love, lust, and longing shared by the central couple. It also reflects envy on the part of Briony, even though it’s not until much later that she realizes its hold on her self. Worn by Cecilia during the film’s most pivotal series of scenes and complemented by a white gold bracelet and a pair of cage-front sandals, it all but becomes a character itself. 

But Durran’s exceptional costume design is only the first hint of Atonement’s strong stylistic leanings. Dario Marianelli’s uniquely percussive score, Seamus McGarvey’s literally brilliant cinematography, and Sarah Greenwood’s pattern- and detail-obsessed production design also contribute greatly to the film’s artistry. One need only watch the five-minute tracking shot of the Dunkirk beaches prior to the evacuation of Allied soldiers in the Second World War toward the end of the film’s second act to see, hear, and feel the aforementioned aspects of filmmaking and then some at breathtaking play. 

That spectacularly long sequence, so effective in its illustration of the misery and absurdity of war, is also suggestive of the devastating effects of Briony’s words and actions on that fateful summer day in 1935 in the lives of Cecilia, who is now a wartime nurse, and Robbie, who is one of the soldiers seeking refuge in the harbor of Dunkirk—both desperately holding on to a mutual promise (“Come back. Come back to me.”) made on the same night they consummated their love in the library, he in his sharpest black suit and she in her backless green dress. 

[This is a style-centric review of one of the most beautiful films ever made—and one of my all-time favorite films—originally posted on Pelikula Tumblr: Style Week.]

Dream Theater

Paprika (2006) 
D: Satoshi Kon 
S: Megumi Hayashibara, Katsunosuke Hori, Tōru Furuya 

One might be forgiven for accusing Christopher Nolan of stealing much of the dream logic that governs Satoshi Kon’s fantastical film, Paprika, and using it as the underlying conceit of his latest blockbuster, Inception, which Paprika predates by no more than four years. While Nolan, speaking in promotional interviews and contributing to production notes, seems to have never seen Kon’s animated feature, both films curiously share a good number of props and elements in common: collapsing nightmares, subconscious detectives, repressed hopes, shattered images, maddening anxieties, and most important, communal and multileveled dreams.

Like most motion pictures done in the manner of anime, Paprika is set in the vaguely foreseeable future. Joint advances in electronics engineering and psychotherapy have led to the invention and further development of a device that lets physicians enter the dreams of their patients and, subconsciously, gradually rid them of their psychic tensions and maladjustments. Known as the “DC Mini” and touted to represent “the hope that shines on the new horizons of psychiatric treatment,” this device is yet to be legally approved and mass-produced (only four prototypes are currently in use) and only a handful of persons, including Dr. Torataro Shima, the wise old chief of laboratory, and Dr. Kosaku Tokita, the obese and child-at-heart genius inventor of the DC Mini, have access to its capacity and proper knowledge of its operation. Foremost among this exclusive group of scientists, though, is Dr. Atsuko Chiba, a beautiful psychotherapist whose technique of treating patients involves infiltrating their dreams while assuming the persona of her younger dreamworld alter-ego, Paprika.

Paprika is quite literally the proverbial “girl of one’s dreams” to many of the patients whose dreams she penetrates. She might also be a minor, if also a bit too literal, example of a “manic pixie dream girl” since she, in a rather twisted sense, teaches patients—to borrow a portion of the definition of said type of character by film critic Nathan Rabin—“to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” Attractive, affable, and astute, she sports a flaming mop of hair and a lively disposition that recall her namesake condiment. In a dream shared with Paprika, one is, more often than not, hard-pressed to hold out against her well-intentioned suggestions.

It’s this combination of intelligence and charm that is put to the test when one of the DC Minis is stolen. In the hands of dutiful and professionally trained individuals like Atsuko, the DC Mini proves to be a valuable instrument in helping patients overcome their psychological problems, but in the hands of corrupt and technologically savvy terrorists, it becomes a lethal weapon capable of manipulating the dreams of other people. Before long, Shima is driven to insanity by a strange “daydream” and attempts to commit suicide and Tokita gets trapped in an equally strange dream and adopts the body of a toy robot. It’s up to Atsuko/Paprika to catch the thief, reestablish the line separating dreams and reality, and save the world, preferably before bedtime. 

If this sounds dizzying and nonsensical, it’s because it is at first. Paprika, based on Yasutaka Tsutsui’s 1993 landmark science fiction novel and adapted and directed as it was by the virtuosic Kon, is suffused with numerous incongruities that stress the film’s central battle between order and chaos and, oddly enough, emphasize the possibility of finding meaning in the mundane. Here a surreal parade of supposedly inanimate objects, such as a refrigerator, a fire hydrant, and a replica of the Statue of Liberty, among many others, now mobile as though bipedal, is a frequent occurrence. So is the haunting image of a violent but poker-faced Japanese doll. So is the suggestion that dreams are no different from cinema and the Internet in their treatment of people’s repressions. And so are incoherent sentences like “The sign is good fortune. The ceiling fan brings a message releasing epithets,” and “The dense forest turns into a shopping district. The 24-bit eggplant will be analyzed,” enthusiastically announced by characters whose dreams are invaded and comically reminiscent of the similarly disruptive and perplexing one-liners in Don DeLillo’s postmodern novel, White Noise, which, incidentally, also deals with how people absorb and process information. With Paprika, Kon reminds his audience that words and symbols, whether encountered in the distorted planes of dreams or in the broad daylight of reality, as well as icons, personal and political both, are more than capable of defining—and destroying—a person. 

Paprika echoes most of the themes Kon cultivated in his previous films. In its essaying of the precariousness of a double life and the merging of fact and fiction, it closely resembles his directorial debut film, Perfect Blue, and his follow-up, Millennium Actress. To a lesser extent, its strange milieus parallel the idiosyncrasies of the characters in Tokyo Godfathers. But to compare Paprika with Nolan’s Inception, which in hindsight is nothing more than a set of five action/fantasy/adventure films cleverly interlaced to transmit a semblance of functional harmony and reduce their individual levels of stridency, in order to get a handle on this wildly imaginative animated film’s flair and exuberance is to do the late visionary director and his work a mild disservice. Paprika is in a league of its own. It is a truly bravura cinematic creation, a Mobius stream of (sub)consciousness, a landscape where truth and reason are found nowhere and everywhere.

[Cross-posted on Pelikula Tumblr: The Cinema of Satoshi Kon]