His first film was Following, an extremely low-budget (damn near guerrilla) film that made the festival circuit but never broke the mainstream. Then came Memento; it was unlike anything audiences had ever seen before. Insomnia, the Prestige, Batman Begins and the Dark Knight…Nolan is one of the most celebrated and accomplished contemporary filmmakers working today. His films are dark and sophisticated, complex and intense. He gets huge box office draw working with themes and structures that in any other hands would be considered too esoteric, too abstruse for the common (American) audience. His work is consistently critically and commercially successful, and yet he has succeeded in retaining his own unique voice in his films, his auteurism, despite the fact that he is now working from deeply within the Hollywood machine. Not unlike Hitchcock himself, really.

Inception is Nolan’s latest achievement, and in many ways it is almost an homage to his earlier work. Written, produced and directed by Nolan himself (as he has done with the majority of his films, save for the script for the adapted Insomnia), Inception is the latest entrant into Nolan’s spiraling world of colliding realities, multi-layered and ever-shifting. Here Nolan goes back to his basics: delving deep into the fractured minds of damaged men to explore their own delicate and imbalanced realities.

Inception is the bigger, glossier, more sci-fi oriented brother of Memento, which was more of a straightforwardly (though non-linear) psycho-drama film noir. But Inception echoes of Memento at every turn: a man whose entire sense of reality is in question, whose own memories can’t be trusted, who has lost a wife and is desperate to bring her back, even though he knows he cannot. Sci-fi action thriller or psychological mindfuck, the question Nolan is ultimately asking is this: how much do we lie to ourselves to preserve our own fragile psyches? Or, in a pedantic theoretical sense, if we construct our own realities how can we ever really know what’s real…and is there even such a thing?

It would be a mistake to compare this film to emotionally void yet visually stunning action flicks like The Matrix, though the multi-tiered layers of so-called reality make the comparison inevitable (Cronenberg’s eXistenZ also comes to mind, as does Sergei Lukyanenko’s concept of the Gloom in his Day Watch novels, in which each layer is increasingly more dangerous and unstable, threatening to claim its victims and make them forget their own realities). But what could have been just another frivolous summer blockbuster, a sci-fi companion to Ocean’s Eleven, is instead a fairly intricate character study.

Cobb – the name itself taken straight from the duplicitous main character in Nolan’s own Following – is an Extractor: he steals people’s dreams. Or, rather, he breaks into people’s dreams in order to steal information, a kind of high-stakes cerebral heist. For reasons that are revealed as the plot unfolds, Cobb (played coolly by Leonardo DiCaprio, with a hint at the inner turmoil about to bubble over) decides to take on a very risky assignment, one which promises to free him once and for all so he can return to his children: an inception, planting an idea rather than stealing one. He enlists the help of other professional thieves and scientists (including Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Cillian Murphy, Ken Watanabe, and Nolan regular Michael Caine), and together they contrive a plan for inception which ultimately requires multiple layers of dreams-within-dreams, numerous faux-realities to construct, and increased levels of danger with every dream level traversed. But during the course of the planning and implementation of the inception, Cobb’s own destructive past is slowly revealed, making him a threat to himself and his team.

And this is where Inception fails: in all of Nolan’s films, each character is given a level of depth too little seen in mainstream films. Here, the characters simply are not developed enough for the audience to feel true empathy. The lack of development could have been salvaged by strong performances, but auxiliary cast members were forgettable (except perhaps Murphy, as the inception target), and our lead actor Leonardo DiCaprio – a fierce talent in certain roles – lacked the intensity necessary to carry the film. The audience does not feel the same self-deluding desperation that Guy Pearce gave us in Memento, or the same torturous obsession Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale exhibited in The Prestige, or even just the internal conflict of Bale as Batman. Nolan’s films are by trademark psychologically probing character studies, regardless of what kind of genre they’re packaged in; here it felt as if Inception tried to be both fully a mind-bending sci-fi thriller AND a quiet descent into the darkest depths of men’s minds…without ever really succeeding at being either.

The one exception here is Marion Cotillard, who plays Cobb’s deceased wife Mal (“evil”) who remains very much alive in his subconscious. Cotillard (whose delightfully wicked turn in Love Me If You Dare should not be missed) is exactly what she needs to be, playing the haunted memory of a troubled wife whose death Cobb is somehow responsible for. She is not a fully-developed character, nor is she supposed to be. Instead, she is a fully-developed obsession, a culmination of all of Cobb’s desires and regrets. She is angry, vengeful, and destructive. She is love and revenge. Her eyes are wild, a feral foil to Cobb’s attempted placidity, betraying his own turmoil roiling beneath the quiet surface. DiCaprio plays Cobb’s secrets discreetly, losing control only when at his most vulnerable – in his dreams, with Mal.

Another issue lies with the development of the Cobb character: his motivations are never really clear – or just don’t entirely make sense. By the end of Memento, it was clear that Leonard Shelby had actively made the decision to continue believing the story he himself created – that his wife had been killed when he was attacked and lost his short-term memory and he was trying to avenge her death – when it reality it was HE who killed her, he was Sammy Jankis, and he conscious mind could not accept what he had done so he continued perpetuating his own false reality in which he plays the avenging hero with a conveniently unreliable memory, leaving himself planted clues to the “killer’s” identity. Inception unravels here (SPOILER ALERT: SKIP TO NEXT PARAGRAPH): if Cobb were indeed still in a dream at the end, what is his motivation for staying there? In this dream world Mal is dead and his children are lost to him; if he could make the decision to descend to another dream level in which they were all together why wouldn’t he do so, if he were already choosing to stay in a dream as it was? A true Memento-era Nolan twist would have been that Cobb became convinced their world wasn’t real, killed his wife to prove it only to find out he was wrong, and decided to escape to a dream world in which she committed suicide instead. This begs the question: has Hollywood softened Nolan?

Nolan’s trademark devices are all in place: an eerily epic score that conveys as much emotion as the actors’ faces; softly-lit flashbacks of tender moments tinged with longing and regret; repeated refrains and images which seem innocuous enough at first until they gain a heavy significance as the plot progresses. But with his newly developed skills as an action film director, Nolan pulls out a gorgeously orchestrated piece of cinematic choreography as characters in a second-tier dream fight inside a rolling hallway, where all sense of orientation is lost and they leap from ceiling to floor to wall. Visuals such as the city of Paris rolling over onto itself are stunning, yet also oddly deemphasized. This visceral film is less about manipulating dream cities and walking on walls and more about navigating the realms of subconscious desires.

Though not quite as non-linear as its precursor Memento, Inception’s resolution is less clear, and less satisfying. No doubt this will benefit from a second viewing, but despite its flaws Inception is another solid example of Nolan’s quiet character studies delving into the darkest natures of man packaged in all the pretty Hollywood glitz to get popcorn audiences in the door and keep academics referencing it in film journals for years to come. A weak film from an auteur of this caliber is still a towering achievement over most others, and even if Hollywood has softened Nolan (or, more likely, forced him to soften himself), a film like Inception is still more daring than most other big-budget blockbusters. You may not get the emotional investment you’ve come to expect from Nolan, but he still does not disappoint the intellect.

Now playing in theatres everywhere.

My Girlfriend’s Back, a romantic comedy which stars Tangi Miller, Malik Yoba, Victoria Gabrielle Pratt and Obba Babatunde, will be shown at 6pm at the Boll Family YMCA, in downtown Detroit, free of charge as the closing night film for the film festival. Due to limited seating those interested in attending this screening must RSVP to http://trinityfilmf estival.eventbrite.com/.

In addition to this film, the TFC Film Festival will also feature a full line up of free film screenings which will take place from 12pm-6pm, with a special meet and greet with actress Lonette McKee (Sparkle, Honey, Third Watch) from 3pm-4pm. For a complete schedule and listing of films please visit www.trinityfilmcoalition.com.

Immediately following the closing night film, the festival award ceremony will take place to select the winners for the best feature and best short film categories.

The Boll Family YMCA is located at 1401 Broadway, Detroit, MI. For more information contact Janaya Black at 734-634-3151 or Marshalle Montgomery at 313-685-3124 or visit www.trinityfilmcoalition.com.

This year’s festival is sponsored by Boll Family YMCA, Sony, Michigan FrontPage, the Michigan Film Office, Ambassador Magazine and B-Side.

About TFC:

The Trinity Film Coalition Film Festival was created in 2006 as a platform to expose independent film makers and their work to the public and to create viable networking opportunities. By offering free programming and events, managing partners Marshalle Montgomery, Rockey and Janaya Black have made it their mission to ensure that Michigan filmmakers are given every opportunity possible to have successful careers in film.

Luckily, that’s not all it means.  Labor Day weekend in Detroit also means a lot of great art and music festivals–we like to save the best for last and then cram them all into one weekend!

There is a little something for everyone this weekend, from jazz to art to film.  Enjoy!

Arts Beats and Eats
No longer the “Chrysler” Arts Beats and Eats (Chrysler could not afford the sponsorship this year), Pontiac’s annual festival of art, music, and food soldiers on with only a $2 admission price.  With 50 restaurants, 200 music performers, and 155 art exhibitors, this is one of the largest festivals in the metro area, not to mention one of the most comprehensive.  (It rivals CityFest in restaurants and music performers and whallops them in art; the Ann Arbor Art Fair has more art but little of anything else.)  It’s one of my favorites and I’m thrilled that, even without their major sponsor, they were still able to pull it off.

Friday-Sunday, 11:00AM-10:00PM, Monday 11:00AM-8:00PM

The Detroit International Jazz Festival
Celebrating its 30th year, the Detroit Jazz Fest (DJF) features 5 stages with over 100 artists performing over the four-day weekend.  It is one of the most noteworthy jazz festivals in the country (and the largest free jazz festival in America), and is a signature event for Detroit.  The DJF strives to perpetuate Detroit’s significant jazz history and nurture the development of jazz by offering educational and collaborative opportunities, and all of it free to everyone.

Friday 6:00PM-11:00PM, Saturday-Sunday 12:00PM-11:00PM, Monday 12:00PM-10:00PM

The Innaugural Ferndale Film Festival
The summer begins with the DWIFF and ends with F3.

Local filmmakers have yet another opportunity to shine with this 4-day festival held in locations all over Ferndale, from Dino’s to the Rosie O’Grady’s.  55 films ranging from 300 second micro-minis to full-length features will be shown throughout the city over this four-day weekend.  Regulars of the local festival circuit–this and last year’s DWIFF, the Mitten Movie Project–will likely see a lot of familiar titles, but there are also plenty of new titles (or ones you might have missed previously) worth checking out.

I know from having been at the screening that there were only about 8 people watching Tracy at this year’s DWIFF, which is an outright shame.  I thought the film was hilarious (read about it here), and I highly recommend to the 8 of you who didn’t already see it that you go to the Go Comedy! Theatre on Saturday at 5:30PM and catch this screening.  Get there an hour earlier and you can also catch local filmmakers Five Clover Films’ Office Space send-up First Day.

The Purple Gang is a riveting documentary that covers one of the most feared (and now one of the least-known) crime syndicates in history–the predominantly Jewish Purple Gang, who ruled Detroit (and much of the country) during Prohibition.  It’s a fascinating piece of local history, and one you don’t often hear much about.  See it at Rosie O’Grady’s Sunday at 8:00PM.

Detroit Unleaded is a much-buzzed-about short film by Detroiter Rola Nashef, which is a coming-of-age drama about two Arab brothers who own a gas station and asks the question: What is the American dream?  This is playing with several other shorts, including the award-winning short Bitch by Lilah Vandenburgh, at AJ’s Cafe on Saturday at 7:00PM.

The Festival opens with the red carpet premiere of Creator of God at the Magic Bag on Friday.  There will be an opening reception inside the venue at 7:00PM followed by the screening at 8:30PM.  F3 also will feature a micro-mini film challenge, outdoor screenings of Army of Darkness and Monsters, Inc., and free workshops which range on topics from guerrilla filmmaking, photography, lighting, and zombie makeup.

Tickets are $5 per screening, $10 for opening night, and $20 for weekend passes.  Tickets are available at Dino’s Lounge and other show locations.  See the website for details on screenings, workshops, and more.

Hamtramck Labor Day Festival
The fringe festival of Labor Day, the Hamtramck Labor Day Festival–now in its 29th year–promises lots and lots of polka, the Polish Day Parade (Monday at 1:30PM), a world music stage featuring everything from Afrobeat to Bosnian pop, and enough local indie rock to see you through to the next indie rock festival (i.e., next weekend).  There will also be children’s activities, a dunk tank, carnival rides, and all the Polish food you can eat (which isn’t much, because those pierogies are filling).  It’s a tried-and-true Hamtramck-style festival!

Friday, September 4th-Monday, September 7th (see website for complete schedule)

Post-Labor Day Events

The fun doesn’t entirely stop after Labor Day!  There are a few more festivals we can count on before we need to break out our parkas once again.

Dally in the Alley
Saturday, September 12th (rain date: Sept. 13) Detroit’s greenest festival returns with indie rock, techno, food, art, beer, and all that random stuff you find in the alley.  It’s got the most DIY spirit of all the Detroit festivals, though it doesn’t quite have the name…

…Not like the DIY Streetfair!
The second installment of this popular music-food-art event, first started last year, is back and is now spanning three days, Friday Sept. 18-Sunday Sept. 20.  The beer garden, featuring all Michigan-made brews, is back, as is the stupendous music lineup on the main stage.  The Hard Lessons, Octopus, Oscillating Fan Club, Johnny Headband, Lee Marvin Computer Arm, Champions of Breakfast, the Hentchmen, Friendly Foes, Child Bite…yes, this is the best indie rock lineup any of the big outdoor festivals have seen yet this year.  It looks like DIY might once again take top prize for best fest!

And there you have it.  It ends not with a whisper, but a bang (on drums, with lots of fuzzy guitars and reverberating amplifiers).  Enjoy these final hours of summer fun!

Please join us on August 27th at 7:30 p.m. at the Royal Oak Main Art Theater to view Food Matters as provided by our hosts Regeneration Raw. All proceeds go to David Wolfe’s Fruit Tree Planting Foundation. Please check out their website: http://www.how2eatraw.com/index.htm

www.slowfooddetroit.org

The new romantic comedy starring Superbad’s Michael Cera will be screened at the Magic Bag’s Brew & View next Wednesday, August 5th, and we’ve got your free tickets here!  Just email Mike Orlando at MOrlando@alliedadvpub.com and let him know you read it on thedetroiter.com.  You’ll receive passes for two to this intelligent, self-flective film which explores the nature and reality of modern-day love through the eyes of a filmmaker whose quest for answers leads to the very thing she didn’t think she would find.

Watch the trailer here, and look for my review here next week!

The now-legendary boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman that took place in Zaire in 1974 (aka the “Rumble in the Jungle”) actually turned out to be two spectacles in one. Complementing the fight was a three-day music festival featuring some of the greatest rhythm and blues talents of all time: James Brown and the Mighty JBs, B.B. King, Bill Withers, the Spinners, Sister Sledge, and the Crusaders, plus world renowned African performers such as Miriam Makeba and Afrisa. And though the concert was designed to coincide with the fight itself, an injury to George Forman caused the match to be pushed back; because of the artists’ commitments, however, the music festival couldn’t be delayed. This historic concert was filmed with a lavish budget and state-of the art techniques, but the footage – assembled or unassembled – has never been unavailable until now. At long last, the knockout feature film version of the event, Soul Power, can be seen, heard, and most of all, felt. A joyous musical celebration and powerful evocation of a particular time and place, Soul Power on the big screen is well worth the three decade wait. (93 min.)

The complete DFT summer schedule continues through August 9th with a host of extraordinary films, all new to the Detroit area. Detailed descriptions can be found @ www.dia.org/dft

Sort of.

Let’s try this again.

Jerichow is an intellectualized exploration of greed and desperation.

Well, yes, it’s definitely that, too.

One more time.

Jerichow is full of surprises.

That pretty much nails it.

While it would be pretty easy, and also accurate enough, to sum up Jerichow as a loose interpretation of James M. Cain’s novel The Postman Always Rings Twice and the films that it inspired, it would also be a gross oversimplification of the emotional layers of the film. While Jerichow has much in common with the neo-noir genre from which the story was born, it also exceeds the generic tropes of the genre to become something much more intellectually intense, a film that speaks all at once about love, greed, betrayal, desperation, fear of death, fear of dependence, fear of abandonment, childish desires, and a longing for home (whether it be near or far). It is film noir transplanted six decades in the future and a full ocean away, set in a small, picturesque East German town where blue collar jobs have all but disappeared and the city is dying a slow death.

Jerichow opens with Thomas (Benno Furmann), a dishonorably discharged (for reasons unexplained) army vet who has just returned to his mother’s home, willed to him after her death. From this opening sequence the theme of money—who has it, who wants it, what one is willing to do to get it—is strong. Thomas’s former business acquaintances (of an unspecified field) are there with him, extending condolences and also a sincere regret that the money he owes must become an issue during this time. The way his former boss speaks to him is reminiscent of the sympathy and sternness one might use when speaking with a child who has done wrong, but who is otherwise a good kid whom you like and really don’t desire to punish. When the boss cleverly deduces Thomas’s hiding spot for his money—in a tin can in his old childhood tree house—it is clear that Thomas is being situated as a kind of child in this film; one whose behavior and perception of the world around him is child-like—simple, sincere, naïve.

Thomas soon meets Ali (Hilmi Sozer), a successful businessman in an area where the odds are against him, who also happens to have a fondness for drink. Thomas helps Ali out of a precarious situation, and so Ali offers him a job. It is through the course of his work that he meets Ali’s wife, Laura (Nina Hoss), a woman who initially treats him with nothing but disdain but who falls for him as he falls for her, in their equally wide-eyed, childish ways.

The basic plotline follows that of Postman fairly closely, until it diverges at the point of the murder plot. As Thomas enters their lives, he observes the strained relationship between Ali and Laura, and ultimately acts as a foil to them, providing an outlet for Laura’s domestic and internal frustration—or perhaps just acting as a playmate in this grown-up world of children’s games and children’s dreams.

Thomas and Laura are like a little kids playing games that are beyond their capacity to understand. They both hide money in places a child would, they run off to sneak kisses though always with the adrenaline-rush risk of being caught, and they plot a heinous crime as an extremist solution to an otherwise straightforward problem. They may be having sex, but there is little that is sexy about it—their sex is an act of desperation, of clinging onto a life they feel is rushing past them. Like children, they latch on to each other and refuse to let go. Thomas claims to love Laura though he knows next to nothing about her, and Laura later responds with “You can’t love, if you don’t have money!” Their understanding of the world is simple to a fault, the kind of naïve perception that one would expect from a child. Whether they are just shielded from or are completely oblivious to reality is never fully realized, though that reality comes crashing through loud and clear with the unexpected ending in which they must reap the consequences of their reckless trickster deeds.

Ali is the only character in the film who is portrayed as something of an adult, though even he is prone to child-like exuberance and overindulgence (such as the scene in which he channels “The Greek” from Postman when he dances drunkenly to Turkish folk music by the sea), and childish emotions (like his insane jealousy and suspicion of his wife, which causes him to follow her around town and beat her). Ali is otherwise a successful businessman who owns a nice home and has beaten life’s odds despite being faced with possible defeat at all turns, though he grapples with his own sense of displacement, feeling even well into middle-age like he is missing his sense of home, like he is living in a land that “doesn’t want him.”

With long looks and a sly thoughtfulness in his eyes, Ali may be a drunkard but he is no fool. He is much wiser to the world than Laura or Thomas who, despite their own tribulations, seem to never have fully developed into functional adults. But it isn’t until the end of the film, when Ali is faced with the imminence of his own death, that he seems to have a full understanding of life, and the horror of it. His final action is meant an eternal punishment for Thomas and Laura, that even though they got what they thought they wanted they must now live with the guilt for the rest of their lives, never really knowing who to blame and unable to seek forgiveness. Murder, as it turns out, is not child’s play.

Throughout the film, money is both a motivational force and a source of destruction. Thomas comes to town with no job, no money, and no work, and becomes dependent upon Ali for the money he pays him. Laura is equally dependent upon Ali and his money, after she married him and he absorbed her considerable (and unspecified) debts. Ali, in turn, is constantly on the lookout for people cheating him in his business, and is savvy to all their tricks as well as smaller strategies such as how to save money on gas while making deliveries. While the cast is very small—really only the three main characters—money plays the fourth silent role in the story. It is addressed in a way that is beyond simple greed; money here is a promise of independence, a new beginning, a source of betrayal, an act of desperation, a lifelong pursuit. These are not the kind of characters who rob a bank to get rich—they need, and want, and yearn, and they each conceptualize money as a means of achieving their goals. They are living in a post-Fordian economy which was in their lifetimes also still politically Socialist, and they are still unsure how to adjust. Ali, the only foreign-born character, is the only one adaptable enough to survive.

Much like a noir film, Jerichow is very quiet and minimalist. There are only three major characters, the settings are limited, the music used sparingly, the dialogue sparse. Much is communicated without words, forcing the audience to decipher the characters’ thoughts, actions, and motivations for themselves. It may strike a viewer as being emotionally detached from its characters or even intentionally elusive, but such determinations undermine the simple yet torrid raw human emotions that are the driving force of the film. Director Christian Petzold is not going to hand-feed you your analysis; he’s going to make you do the work yourself, but he gives you all you need to understand.

Jerichow is Petzold’s latest incisive offering, coming after his internationally acclaimed Yella. Considered by many critics to be one of the most talented and underappreciated filmmakers internationally, his films have a certain headiness that suit the arthouse crowd much better than a mainstream audience. Both leads, Furmann and Hoss, have worked with him on multiple occasions, and it seems obvious in their understated yet emotionally charged performances that this is a director who is able to conjure the exact kind of performance from his actors that his script requires, and they are more than happy to deliver it to him.

As a film, Jerichow is tight and controlled, revealing only as much as is necessary and at a carefully measured pace. The characters are each desperately searching for something—for independence, for home, for life. Deftly balancing a crime that is drained of its passion and replaced with something much more complex with a ground-level paradigm shift in global economy, Jerichow is indeed full of surprises.

Jerichow is now playing at the Detroit Film Theatre through Sunday, August 2nd. Check website for showtimes and ticket information.

“A taut, brilliantly acted thriller.”
-Scott Foundas, L.A. Weekly
One of literature’s supremely steamy and enticingly lurid portraits of desire, writer James M. Cain’s classic tale The Postman Always Rings Twice has been adapted for the movies by filmmakers from America to Italy to China, with each version putting its own unique spin on the hypnotic tale of a passionate love triangle heading wildly out of control. Now, German director Christian Petzold – using Cain’s original story as his basic framework – has brought a riveting new interpretation of this legendary work to the screen in Jerichow. While not precisely a strict remake of Postman, the basic elements are all in place – a neglected wife, her seemingly insensitive husband, a handsome young drifter – but Petzold sees every element of the story in a new way, and as a result, we do too. Jerichow demonstrates brilliantly that while we may not always be in control of the passions fate brings to us, our response to those emotions will always have consequences. (93 min.)

The complete DFT summer schedule continues through August 9th with a host of extraordinary films, all new to the Detroit area. Detailed descriptions can be found @ www.dia.org/dft

I know that it is written somewhere in the top-secret handbook of film critics that you must give rave reviews to all foreign films no matter what, especially when that foreign film deals with a specific culture or practice that is scarcely touched upon (such as: goat herders inhabiting the steppes of Kazakhstan), filling some void in the cultural awareness of Americans via a limited-release foreign-language arthouse flick (and film critics love a good cultural-awareness-enhancing arthouse flick). And so I am aware that I just might be the only critic in the entire U-Ess-of-A who will openly say without hesitation that I did not like this movie, and I know this proclamation will draw gasps from the culture-fetishist arthouse types who feel that liking all foreign-language arthouse flicks, especially the ones about remote nomadic life, and calling the film things like “extraordinary” and “intoxicating,” is the hallmark of a distinctly cultured and intellectually superior person and to not agree means by direct proportion you are not as distinctly cultured and intellectually superior as those who clearly know better.

Yes, I am aware of this. All that being said, I still didn’t like this film.

Tulpan is the story of a young man named Asa (Askhat Kuchinchirekov) with dreams, big dreams. He was a naval officer and now he’s looking to get himself a nice little wifey and his very own flock of sheep to herd so he can have a nice little life on the steppes of Kazakhstan, and oh yes he’s going to be WAY more successful in this lifestyle than his poverty-stricken sister’s family, who are putting him up during his stay to fetch said wifey, because, you know, he’s got dreams. He doesn’t know a thing about sheep-herding and a live birth makes him gag, but still—he’s got dreams.

Our title character is the potential wife in question, who in turn has absolutely no interest in Asa nor in the fantasyland he concocts in which octopi are large enough to strangle a human and a man with no relevant knowledge can strike it rich living a nomad’s life. Bee-tea-double-u, we never actually see more than the back of the title character’s head. Which is fitting—that the film was named after its most elusive character—considering that the film itself is never quite sure what kind of film it actually wants to be; the name and its seemingly only tangential relationship to the storyline is representative of the film’s overall incohesiveness.

The film has no clear sense of theme or direction. Is it an ethnographic documentary? Is it a kind of love story (and only by the broadest stretch of the term)? Is it a coming-of-age tale, or a story exploring the delicate and often explosive nature of family? Well, it’s a little of each, and not really wholly any, which isn’t to say that a film cannot be more than one “thing”…it just doesn’t work here. Tulpan hints at weighty issues including but not limited to: poverty, a dying way of life, the importance of familial bonds, unrequited love, misguided ambition, the importance of self-discovery, and some other things. The ambling goofiness of Asa and his best friend Boni when juxtaposed with the much more serious and sincere issues that face sheepherders constantly on the brink of starvation simply do not mesh—the light-heartedness undermines the more serious tones and make them into a kind of joke, or at least make them seem, well, not all that serious.

It wants to be a love story, though it isn’t. Asa becomes hell-bent on pursuing the fickle Tulpan, despite her constant rejection, and who could blame her? The man courting her is whiny, annoying, and as Tulpan herself points out, has big ears. He is a wide-eyed dreamer convinced, much like arrogant youth can so often be, that he can follow the same path as his family but be so much the more successful for it. He is childish and naïve, lacking any sense of grounded reality. And in his worst moments, he is ungrateful, pig-headed, and insulting. I wouldn’t want to marry him either.

I realize that to draw such vivid characters as to evoke such a strong emotion from me, the viewer (in this case, extreme irritation) points to strong directing, dialogue, and acting. None of this is in question here. But how am I supposed to be rooting for this guy to win the heart of the modernly ambitious Tulpan when all I really want is for her to follow her dreams away from him and from the steppes of Kazakhstan? And did I mention that Asa is only “in love” with Tulpan because she happens to be the only available female around and his boss will not give him his own flock of sheep until he has a wife? Kind of sucks the romance out of it a little, doesn’t it?

But that’s only one element of the film. When it drops the goofy antics of Asa and Boni, the film drops Asa’s (and, by extension, Tulpan’s) storyline entirely, then focusing on the lives on Samal and Ondas, Asa’s sister and brother-in-law. In these moments, the film actually does become a quiet, tender portrayal of this vanishing nomadic way of life, displaying without over-sentimentalizing their constant struggle for survival and in the midst of all that, their strength and love as a family. But then it’s back to Asa and his asinine behavior, or long uncut shots of scenery characteristic of a geographic documentary, and the film gets jumbled once again.

Tulpan is the first feature film directed by Sergei Dvortsevoy (who shares writing credits with Gennadi Ostrovsky), whose previous films were small documentaries about small people with small ways of life. This feature is entirely in keeping with his repertoire; however, he hasn’t yet fully graduated from documentary to narrative, and Tulpan, like a newborn lamb unsure of its footing, is evidence of those first few shaky steps. Which isn’t to say he won’t get there—he just hasn’t yet.

In between subtle, simple, touching interactions between Samal, Ondas, and their children, Dvortsevoy intercuts lengthy, uncut shots of the desert, the windstorms, the sheep being herded…effectively halting the narrative flow each time. The film has no soundtrack but instead relies on the jarring, discordant sounds of a donkey braying incessantly, a high-pitched child’s voice singing off-key, and deafening windstorms to fill the soundtrack void during unnecessarily long scenes of a child running through the sands and clouds moving through the sky and wind blowing. Honestly this film could be watched entirely on fast-forward and would probably still be just as tedious, though it would be over twice as fast.

There is humor in the script, certainly, as there is also a certain amount of tenderness. Unknown actors essentially playing themselves give fine, understated, nuanced performances. Dvortsevoy’s filming style gives it a sense of documentary-like realism, but unfortunately, this is not a documentary but a narrative, and one that never quite fully gels. By the time Asa has his Big Awakening (which is the only point in time that the film falls prey to the romanticizing it constantly teeters on the edge of), I had entirely lost interest in him. While it would be easy to gush about the beauty, charm, realism, and cultural heritage present in the film, try not to get too caught up in the cinematography—which, in essence, seems to be the very mistake the director made.

Tulpan plays at the Detroit Film Theatre inside the DIA July 17th-26th. See website for ticket information and showtimes: www.dia.org/dft.

Séraphine
“Sublime. One of the most evocative films about an artist I’ve ever seen.”
-David Edelstein, New York Magazine
The great, still far-too-little-known painter named Séraphine de Senlis (1864 – 1942) was a simple and profoundly devout housekeeper who in 1905 at the age of 41 – completely self-taught and absolutely certain of the presence of her guardian angel – began painting a series of brilliantly colored, hauntingly beautiful canvases which today grace the walls of some of the world’s most famous museums. It would be years before Séraphine’s work would reach the public – which only happened at all because a celebrated art critic who rented rooms in the house where Séraphine scrubbed floors was utterly thunderstruck by her talent. Seraphine’s story, at once tragic and soaring, is at last told in this brilliantly engaging new movie, winner of seven 2009 Cesar Awards (France’s Oscar) including Best Actress (the astounding Yolande Moreau), Best Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture of the Year. In every way, Séraphine is an experience not to be missed. (121 minutes)

The complete DFT summer schedule continues through August 9th with a host of extraordinary films, all new to the Detroit area. Detailed descriptions can be found @ www.dia.org/dft