Entries associated with the tag "Lights in the Dusk":

Film comedies have always been a problem for me, since for the most part I don't find 'em "funny." (Funny: what's that? When you laugh, I guess, though Rob Zombie movies—or Milla Jovovich in Resident Evil: Extinction ... can't hardly wait for that one!—probably don't count.) And with the recent canonization of everything Judd Apatow touches, things are looking bleaker all the time, at least from my side of the aisle. Poker-faced through The 40-Year-Old Virgin, poker-faced through Knocked Up, poker-faced through Superbad (I mean, what's with the decibel count: if the characters don't immediately turn into screaming, gesticulating ferrets, does it mean the "comedy" has somehow failed?). As desolating as it undoubtedly is, Aki Kaurismaki's Lights in the Dusk seems more chortlesome (now there's a word!) than anything Apatow et al have been able to cook up. Maybe it's the very numbness of it, like a whiff of nitrous oxide in the dentist's chair: cleaned out and bracing, daring you to find subliminal riffs in an open, airy void—what's not to like about that?

But still I'm not laughing, since that's not primarily what Kaurismaki's about ... so what does set me off comedywise? Probably a window to the soul in this—and maybe I should close it while the opportunity's still there—but so far this year it's been DeCillo's Delirious, Hartley's Fay Grim (two-thirds a white telephone movie elegantly skewed ... until the deplorable imploding finale), Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain!, Edgar Wright's Hot Fuzz, Waitress if you care to count it, then ... nada, zilch, zero. What all these personal faves ultimately share is a reliance on mise-en-scene—on spatial relations and blocking, attitudes and movement, visual filigree—rather than literally "funny" lines. Obviously not into the yackety end of things, which wretched hearing partially accounts for—but only partially, since the same division holds with subtitled movies. And I do hate stand-up, the expectation to laugh's too overbearing and brutal—no Sarah Silvermans for this guy, please.

So what's the "best" comedy in the last five years? My own vote goes to—whoa, credibility alert!—Catherine Breillat's Sex Is Comedy (2002) ... which hardly seems anyone else's idea of a good time at all. Except for me it's almost a "been there, saw that" kind of deal—just a typewriter-wielding factotum at the derriere end of the trade (apologies for the imagery)—and, my god, she's got it all down cold: yes, they do actually debate which body parts to crop out of the frame and which photogs do or don't know how to shoot breasts and schlongs, etc. It's also extremely perceptive in what it emotionally deconstructs and clarifies ... maybe even too much so. You wonder how anyone with Breillat's kind of knowledge (or for that matter Anne Parillaud's, her alter ego in the film) can sustain a "romantic" relation at all. Or maybe she doesn't: insight as the ultimate incapacitator, a life beyond all fantasy ... but who's in a position to say?

Attendance was minimal at the screening I attended of Aki Kaurismaki's Lights in the Dusk, which played at the Gene Siskel Film Center last week (July 20-26), though somehow you suspect Kaurismaki would've wanted it that way. Or maybe this way: one lonely viewer in an otherwise empty theater, the better to nip any general stirrings of levity in the bud. Laugh if you absolutely have to, but if you do you're on your own, with only the empty seats as witness to your, well . . . unseemly outburst! Since all of Kaurismaki is about tamping down, putting the clamps on tone, not reinforcing whatever irruptive impulses you'd want to entertain: it's just you and the everlasting universal maw, which, as we all know, ultimately swallows you whole. Second law of thermodynamics: everything winds down . . . except Kaurismaki's already been there ahead of you.

But there's an art to this entropic dancing around, and Kaurismaki's pretty well the master of it. Never too much this or that, and for every dire reversal a promise of new beginnings. Desperation's always at the door, yet somehow never gets in to ransack the joint. Or if it does then out of the detritus come these fragile bursting shoots, as ecologically imperiled as they are impossibly resolute—like the clasped hands at the end of Lights, which in terms of the movie's zero-sum balancing act, seem almost too hopeful: thank God they're on-screen for only a fraction of a second. More interesting to me though—as with Kaurismaki's films generally—are the minimalist blips of life along the distressed margins of the frame: open, airy visuals, clean-cut and linear, that invariably subvert the bare-bones determinism of story. Or don't, since it's always a matter of tit for tat, of riding a liminal wave.

Arguably of course, we've been through all this before—certainly with this director—though the idea of recycling your own work endlessly brings to mind the career of Jacques Demy, whose ambition it was to "make fifty films which will be linked together and which will mutually illuminate each other's meaning through shared characters." It's subtle variations that make this sort of thing fascinating, assuming—as I will here—that it's fascinating at all, and subtlety in barely inflected doses is probably where we're at with the ironic Finn right now. Banality as auteuristic option: I guess the jury's still out on that one.

Anyway, lichens on a tundra clinging to the rocks is what Lights in the Dusk puts me in mind of most. So is that some kind of beautiful or what?