Noted screenwriter/director Paul Schrader wrote a very interesting piece in the Guardian the other day in which he suggests that viewers are suffering from narrative exhaustion. He speculates that the average thirty-year-old has already watched 35,000 hours of audio-visual narratives. Given the limited number of possible storylines, today’s media-makers have resorted to other strategies to make their work seem fresh and less predictable. This has given rise to the popularity of such forms as reality television, documentaries, videogames, short-format pieces created specifically for cellphones, and what Schrader calls “anecdotal narrative.” In discussing this last term, he explains: “The attraction of films such as Slacker and its mumblecore progeny is the joy of watching behaviour unencumbered by the artifice of plot. It is not ‘fake,’ not ‘contrived’ (although of course it is).”

Like a number of Gus Van Sant’s recent films or Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control, Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience represents a similar attempt by a major American filmmaker to create an alternative to conventional narrative by eschewing a fully-realized screenplay in favor of a brief (six- to seven-page) outline, the use of mostly non-professional actors and structured improvisation. Shot quickly with a small crew and a high-definition Red camera over several weeks, Soderbergh’s film is a portrait of a high-priced escort. Chelsea, played by porn star Sasha Grey, is a different breed of prostitute. While trafficking in sex, what she really offers is the simulation of a personal love experience.

Set during the heat of the presidential election and the financial meltdown last fall, The Girlfriend Experience documents the excess of wealth that fuels the GFE phenomenon – extravagant lifestyles involving art, high fashion, chic restaurants, and weekend junkets to Las Vegas on private jets. The film suggests that, as the discrepancy between rich and poor widens, sexuality for the super rich has become another commodity. Indeed, Chelsea narrates her various appointments in terms of designer outfits and other status markers, while also noting client’s financial anxieties involving friends, business, and an economy suddenly in free fall. Sessions often begin with questions about spouses and children, who are addressed on a first-name basis, providing the veneer of intimacy.

Chelsea is also involved in a relationship with a live-in boyfriend named Chris (Chris Santos). He’s a personal trainer at an upscale gym – another service industry for people with too much cash to burn. We watch Chris at work as he uses his charm to con his clients into signing up for additional sessions by developing his own ersatz relationship with them. Chris is also on the make – he also attempts to peddle a new line of clothes and angles for a cut of his gym’s business.

If the film examines the contradictions of paid escorts as intimate personal relationships, it also delves into similar conundrums involved in living with a prostitute. For both parties, it necessitates compartmentalizing their lives. When one of his clients suggests that Chris join a group of business guys for a weekend in Vegas, he initially declines out of deference to Chelsea. She’s into “personology” books – an irrational system Chelsea relies on to make decisions about clients and to cope with the dangers implicit in her line of work. It leads Chelsea to decide to spend a weekend with a new client on a whim, but this violates the “rules”of her relationship with Chris. When she breaks the news to him, Chris lashes out at her in very frank terms that belie the mutual deception at the heart of their arrangement.

Throughout her interactions, Chelsea projects an image of a woman in control of her emotions, or someone who shows very little affect. Her blankness is part of her allure to these men, allowing them to project their own fantasies onto her. Yet fissures eventually develop in her armor. Despite her belief that she’s the best at what she does, Chelsea nevertheless gets jealous when she sees a client with a new competitor. She also gets victimized by a sleazy operator (played by film critic Glenn Kenny) of an online Web site, entitled The Erotic Connoisseur. Under the guise of raising her profile to even greater heights within the profession, he hustles her into giving him a freebie in exchange for promotion. His review of her performance is a brutal and devastating putdown. After Chelsea breaks up with Chris because of feelings for a new client, a screenwriter named David, her intuition turns out to be misguided. As Chris has predicted, the client dumps her in order to return home to his wife and two young daughters, which leaves Chelsea stranded and in tears.

Although The Girlfriend Experience was apparently shot chronologically, Soderbergh scrambles time in order to create greater narrative complexity. We move back and forth between Chelsea and Chris. We observe Chelsea’s various interactions – with numerous clients, the operator of the erotic Web site, a business manager, and a magazine journalist who asks her probing personal questions about her line of work. Soderbergh confounds the story by having an adult sex star play a Manhattan call girl and by casting nonprofessional actors to play characters who bear some resemblance to themselves in real life. In a sense, the performers become the characters. The collapse between actor and role and the use of controlled improvisation lends a degree of authenticity to the film.

Soderbergh shoots mostly with available light, resulting in scenes that have either warm orange-red or cool blue tones. At times he plays with focus to give the image a greater sense of abstraction. Andy Warhol rather than Cassavetes proves to be the stronger influence here. Soderbergh told Filmmaker that he has become more interested in “this fusion of real people and real stories with a fictional story.” He elaborates: “I guess it’s something that grows out of my frustration with the norms of cinema narrative storytelling and the fact that I’m convinced that the gains that can be achieved through presenting something that seems like it is really happening in front of you are more significant than the gains you get from something that doesn’t seem real but is better constructed.”

In sex, lies, and videotape (1989), Soderbergh managed to capture the Zeitgeist of the time – people’s fear of sex in an age of AIDS – by exploring issues about intimacy and pornography. It’s hardly surprising that he would use a porn star to explore issues of intimacy in his new film. Even though the outline for The Girlfriend Experience was written by David Levian and Brian Koppelman in 2006, Soderbergh has managed to create an snapshot of a period in which America appears to be on the verge of change and late capitalism feels as if it is finally unraveling. This timeliness turns out to be one of the major advantages of Soderbergh’s more open and flexible method of making a film.

Postscript:

It is ironic that Columbia Pictures has placed Soderbergh’s $50 million film Moneyball in limited turnaround, a mere four days before it was scheduled to begin production, even though the film has actor Brad Pitt attached. What’s interesting is that Columbia head Amy Pascal was unhappy with Soderbergh’s re-working of the script. According to Variety: “The move came after Pascal read a rewrite that Soderbergh did to Steven Zaillian’s script and found it very different from the earlier scripts she championed. Pascal was uncomfortable enough with how the vision had changed that she applied the brakes.” The article goes on to say: “Even though it was approved by Major League Baseball, the script doesn’t follow the traditional narrative structure of most sports yarns.”

In the same Filmmmaker interview from which I quoted earlier, Soderbergh indicates that Moneyball was going to be his “most extreme attempt” at combining reality and fiction. Based on this recent development at Columbia, it would appear that Soderbergh’s current artistic interests do not necessarily coincide with those of Hollywood, especially regarding the primacy of the script. Is anyone surprised?

Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, Mary Jordan’s absorbing documentary portrait of the legendary filmmaker and performer, certainly gives a strong flavor of this underground artist, whose importance never really has been disputed within avant-garde circles, even if he’s not a household name or nearly as famous as many of the other major artists he influenced, including Andy Warhol, John Waters, or the Italian director Federico Fellini.

Jack Smith (1932-1989) led a very troubled life. Smith was born in Columbus, Ohio. His mother, who married three times, moved to Galveston, Texas and then to Kenosha, Wisconsin. The film reveals that she left Jack and his sister, Sue Slater, alone for two weeks before the final relocation. It’s no wonder that Smith blamed his mother for sending him “crippled” out into the world. In a letter to her, which he recites in the film, he confesses, “I’m left with feelings of jealousy, mistrust of women, homosexuality, impotence.”

Jack Smith’s issues were not only with his mother, but with the world at large. A militant anarchist, the intensely political Smith railed against capitalism in the guise of “Landlordism” and “Lobsterism” – his own colorful vocabulary for “exploitation” – as the source of much of his own and society’s ills. A modern-day Proudhon, Smith couldn’t fathom either paying rent or art collecting – to him both were merely different forms of theft.

Smith vented against people and institutions for not supporting him in his artistic endeavors, believing that “real art” was destined to get “mutilated” within capitalist culture. He became famous for making one of the most notorious underground films of the 1960s, Flaming Creatures (1962) – a baroque, gender-bending orgy of naked and costumed bodies, which was busted and became a test case of censorship laws. The experience had a traumatic effect on both Jack Smith and his career. The reception of Flaming Creatures became a rationalization for his “never making any masterpieces again” or finishing any of his later films.

As a child, Smith became enthralled with the B-movie actress Maria Montez, who became a lifelong obsession. According to the composer John Zorn, Jack would cry whenever he watched her movies. The late playwright and Warhol screenwriter Ronald Tavel calls the actress a “diva,” while John Vaccaro refers to her as “the apotheosis of the drag queen.” Only filmmaker Nick Zedd counters that he couldn’t understand this adoration of Montez because she was such a “mediocre actress.” When Smith was dying in the hospital after deliberately contracting AIDS, Tavel suggests that rather than being bored, Jack was happy because it gave him more time to ruminate about Montez.

For Jack, Maria Montez represented the epitome of exotic glamour. To him, she became a fantastic imaginary world that replaced the ugly one in which he found himself. Smith turned the NYC loft where he lived for the last nine years of his life into a virtual fantasy land. The film provides a glimpse of Smith’s glorious inner life by tracking through what was in reality an elaborate and colorful stage set, which was dismantled and destroyed after his death.

Jack’s performances were notorious within the art world. He would announce that an event would begin at a certain prescribed time and then delay it for hours, causing many audience members to flee when nothing happened. Tavel suggests that Smith did this deliberately. He quotes Jack as saying, “I don’t want the scum of Baghdad. I want only the best.” The artist who insists that art should be made free to the masses turns out to be an elitist at heart. Jack Smith was full of contradictions, but his own response to the issue of audience was simply: “Something had to be done in order to keep them from becoming sofa-roosting cabbages.”

My only personal experience with Jack Smith was being invited to a small gathering at someone’s loft in the late 1970s where it was rumored that Jack was going to perform. Throughout the night, he made strange faces, glared at people suspiciously, periodically whispered in the host’s ear, and continually disappeared into a hall closet, where he seemed to rummage around for hours. Needless to say, Jack lived up to his reputation, and I finally left around midnight. Yet what he was actually doing could be construed as a weird performance of sorts.

Jack Smith’s personal animosity for Jonas Mekas became another major fixation. Smith despised Mekas for using Flaming Creatures as part of an anti-censorship crusade during the 1960s. Smith complains that Mekas could “be made to seem like a saint, to be in the position of defending something, when he’s really kicking it to death.” Ronald Tavel suggests that Mekas’s strategy was to make “as much money as possible from those films and give as little as possible to the filmmaker.”

Although Jonas appears in the film, it’s never clear that he’s ever responding to such charges, which is one of the unfortunate drawbacks of Jordan’s decision to make a heavily-edited compilation film. As far as information obtained from interviews, it’s simply not possible to understand either the questions or the context of the answers. In any event, I seriously doubt that there were buckets of money to be made from screening Flaming Creatures at the time, or that Jonas secretly was pocketing money that was owed to Smith.

Smith began to refer to Mekas by a variety of disparaging names, including “Uncle Fishhook.” Sylvère Lotringer helped to legitimize Jack’s personal attacks on Mekas in a 1978 issue of Semiotext(e). As Lotringer explains in Jordan’s film, Uncle Fishhook became a symbol of the system: “Uncle Fishhook became like this kind of embodiment of a myth that was so much bigger than Jonas Mekas could be.” Jack also had the bad habit of turning on people. Lotringer tells of hearing rumors that Jack was walking around the East Village with an ax and wanted to kill him.

There are plenty of published sources on the ongoing feud between Mekas and Jack Smith, but we never do get to hear Jonas’s side. There is an explanation for why Mekas withheld the original film of Flaming Creatures from Jack Smith once it came into his possession. As an archivist, Mekas wanted to preserve Jack’s legacy, especially because Smith would project and edit his originals during screenings that he turned into theatrical events. Is trying to save the original of Flaming Creatures such a bad thing? For Smith, it became part of a larger paranoid conspiracy in which he cast himself in the role of victim.

Jordan’s film also glorifies Jack Smith at the expense of Andy Warhol. As Nayland Blake rightly states: “So many contemporary artists trace their practice back to Warhol at this point, and a lot of the important ideas in Warhol come from Jack.” Robert Wilson indicates that Warhol couldn’t have made the films he did without having known Jack. John Waters claims of Jack Smith: “He did it all first. He started something that other people took and became more successful with.”

Lawrence Rinder, the museum curator and director, along with noted composer and filmmaker Tony Conrad, point to Warhol’s Factory and the whole notion of superstars as deriving from Jack Smith. Artist Mike Kelly mentions the fact that Warhol used Smith’s actors for his own films. Yet none of this is really news. Warhol, who watched films at the Filmmakers’ Cinemateque prior to making them, was influenced by many experimental filmmakers, including Kenneth Anger, Ron Rice, and Jack Smith. Warhol never denied his admiration for Smith’s work. Instead he indicates that Smith was “the only person I would ever copy” and adds, “I just think he makes the best movies.”

Jack Smith appeared in a number of Warhol films, including the unfinished Batman/Dracula (1964), Camp (1965), and Hedy (1966). George Kuchar points out that in Batman/Dracula, Warhol failed to record all of Jack Smith’s performance because of bad framing. Henry Hills and others claim that Smith took over Camp, where he managed to get Warhol to move his camera. Mekas suggests that the two artists clashed because Smith wanted to have complete control. If Smith was all about control, Warhol was the exact opposite – he was interested in abdicating authorial control.

Mario Montez, Jack’s drag-queen incarnation of Maria Montez, appeared in a number of Warhol films as well, which Smith didn’t appreciate. Like a overly protective parent, Jack Smith criticizes how Mario Montez was being employed by Warhol. While Smith never specifies a title, he seems to have in mind Screen Test # 2 (1965) when he laments: “I just hate to see this happening to Mario. Slowly watching Mario’s brain being eaten away . . . being turned into a jabbering mongrel by your proximity to tape recorders. It overstimulates him dreadfully. Can’t you see that?”

The schism between Smith and Warhol was personal, but also represents the difference between a baroque and pop sensibility. Smith had a trash aesthetic. His art was about making something beautiful out of nothing. Warhol used techniques of mass production in his art, hence the whole idea of The Factory, which enabled him to become an incredibly prolific artist. Jack Smith takes a direct swipe at Warhol when he says, “Manufacturing and making art are two different things.” Warhol obviously didn’t think so. Smith insists, “I want to be uncommercial film personified.” Warhol, on the other hand, always had commercial aspirations and made the fact that art was a business only too evident.

While the film certainly sides with Smith over Warhol, the film’s compilation technique allows it to move, for instance, from John Waters saying, “He [Jack Smith] was a great personality and a great filmmaker who changed everything” to someone claiming that “Jack Smith was the real Warhol.” Frankly, I find that to be an incredible leap. There is no question that Jack Smith exerted an enormous influence on Warhol, but what does it mean to say he was “the real Warhol?” In different voices of various interviewees, Jordan also edits fragments of the interviews into the hyperbolic assertion that Jack Smith reinvented theater, photography, film, performance art, glitter, installation art, time, and music videos.

Many notable artists get a chance to discuss Jack Smith and the brilliance of his work, which alone makes this film worth viewing. Voice critic J. Hoberman, who has written extensively on the work of Jack Smith, is sorely missing as an interviewee for reasons that have to do with the making of Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis and issues related to Smith’s estate (For details, click here and here). And the inclusion of scholars, such as Callie Angell, might have provided the film with a more balanced perspective on Warhol.

Smith’s social critique extended to curators, museums, and foundations, whose real function he believed was “commercialization.” Only John Waters introduces a dose of reality into Jack Smith’s vilification of museums: “He bit every hand that could ever, ever feed him. And so, the problem is nobody knows his movies because of that. And he never finished them. And if he maybe had been a little less difficult, maybe we would have seen his movies more. They’re very obscure now. He bit the hand! Museums. . . who else is going to show them? It’s [sic] not going to play at Radio City Music Hall!”

Toward the end of the film, Smith makes a startling and rare admission about himself in terms of his artistic career: “It’s my fault. I haven’t been organized properly. . . I was never organized nearly enough. I didn’t know those things.” But, as Jack Smith insightfully points out, had he done all the things he should have done or that were expected of him, “I wouldn’t have been the same person.”

The strand of American independent cinema known as “underground film” often used explicit or provocative sexual material to push censorship boundaries in the 1960s. Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, for instance, became highly publicized censorship cases. Independent features, such as Shirley Clarke’s The Connection, also provoked court battles for other reasons. This explains why “The First Statement of the New American Cinema Group,” which was penned by Jonas Mekas, had made censorship in any form one of its major issues. In the case of Todd Solondz’s Happiness (1998), the matter of contention was not government censorship, but self-censorship on the part of October Films and its parent companies, which refused to release the film due to its controversial subject matter.

Happiness tells the story of the three sisters who live in New Jersey, and their Florida-based parents who suddenly find themselves getting a divorce. The three Jordan sisters – Joy, Helen, and Trish – are remarkably different from each other, yet on a same trajectory for an unhappy fate. Joy (Jane Adams) is the family loser, the one with the lowest self-esteem, who struggles with her career and relationships. Both of her relationships end disastrously. Her break-up with an office-mate, Andy (Jon Lovitz), leads to his suicide, while a later fling with one of her ESL students, a Russian immigrant named Vlad, leads to embarrassment and humiliation.

Joy’s sister Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle) is a best-selling writer whose commercial success only confirms her creative doubts. Despite the international set of physical hunks who orbit around her, she is sexually unsatisfied and winds up responding to an obscene phone call from her computer-geek neighbor, Allen (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Only the obnoxious and superficial Trish (Cynthia Stevenson), mindlessly ensconced in suburbia, believes she has it all. But her suburban illusions of the happy life have blinded her to the marital problems with her husband, Bill Maplewood (Dylan Baker), a mild-mannered psychiatrist with serial-killer fantasies and his own dark secrets. His attempts to counsel their son, Billy, with his awakened pubescent sexuality eventually leads Bill to molest two of his son’s friends, destroying Trish’s “model-perfect” life.

In many ways, Happiness seems to be a sequel to Solondz’s previous film, Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995). It is easy to imagine the middle school kids of Dollhouse growing up into the kind of adult misfits we find here. Solondz uses their interlocking relationships and stories to paint an extended portrait of contemporary suburban life. The sanitized image of the suburbs as a refuge from urban problems gets turned upside down in Happiness. Solondz presents the suburbs as a nightmarish breeding ground for the worst tabloid excesses – child molestation, incest, murder, rape, exhibitionism, autoeroticism, sadomasochism, phone sex, drug abuse, suicide, divorce, and partner abuse.

The multiple plot structure of Happiness makes it a far more complex film than Welcome to the Dollhouse. Unlike Dollhouse, which has Dawn Wiener as its obvious central character, Happiness focuses on a host of characters, but nevertheless has the Jordan family at its center. There are the three Jordan sisters and their parents, Lenny (Ben Gazzara) and Mona (Louise Lasser), along with their families, friends, neighbors, and lovers.

Joy becomes involved in relationships with Andy and the petty criminal Vlad, who has a possessive girlfriend named Zhenia. Trish has a three-kid family, but the film only concentrates on her husband, Bill Maplewood, and their son, Billy. There is also Billy’s Little League teammate, Johnny Grasso, and his father, Joe, as well as Billy’s classmate Ronald Farber, who plays an off-screen role in Bill’s eventual downfall. Allen, the obscene phone caller, is Helen’s neighbor as well as Bill’s patient. To further connect the many dots in the plot, Allen makes obscene phone calls to both Joy and Helen. Kristina (Camryn Manheim) is another neighbor of Helen’s, but she only enters the film because of Allen. She, in turn, relates a murderous story involving an alleged rapist Pedro, the building doorman. And finally there’s Lenny’s friend, Diane, who threatens Mona by making a play for Lenny, but he turns out not to be interested.

The numerous plot threads of Happiness makes an analysis of the film’s structure difficult, especially in terms of segmenting the acts. The script of Happiness consists of 116 pages, which translates into approximately 134 minutes of screen time. Even though there are over a dozen major characters and multiple, often intersecting plotlines, Bill Maplewood has to be considered the central character of Happiness because he has the most at stake.

The first turning point occurs when Bill Maplewood drugs Johnny Grasso during a sleep-over at 48 minutes. The second turning point happens when Johnny tells his mother about the blood in his stools. From this point on (82 minutes), it will only be a matter of time before Bill will be caught. The overall act-breakdown would be a first act of 48 minutes, a short middle act of 34 minutes, and a long third act that is 52 minutes. The first act takes longer than most films because so many different characters have to be introduced. The middle act is short because there are not the usual escalating obstacles blocking the characters’ desires. Instead, the middle act simply develops the other character plots – Mona’s attempt to buy a condo, Diane’s play for Lenny, Allen’s obscene phone call to Helen, Kristina’s awkward attempt to befriend Allen, Joy’s sexual encounter with Vlad, as well as Zhenia’s assault of Joy. The final act is unusually long because so many plotlines have to be resolved.

Another way to segment the act-structure of Happiness would be to look at various plots and subplots in terms of their plot points. Bill Maplewood publicly masturbates at 19 minutes. Mona tells Trish Lenny wants a divorce at 25 minutes. Joy learns of Andy’s suicide at 35 minutes. Bill drugs Johnny at 48 minutes. Allen makes an obscene phone call to Helen, who gets turned on by it, at 65 minutes. Joy sleeps with Vlad at 78 minutes and gets assaulted by Zhenia at 81 minutes. Johnny informs his mother about his physical problems at 82 minutes. Bill stalks Ronald Farber at 87 minutes. Lenny rejects Diane at 96 minutes. Kristina confesses her murder of Pedro at 106 minutes. Helen spurns Allen at 112 minutes. Joy pays Vlad five hundred dollatrs to retrieve her stolen possessions at 118 minutes. At 121 minutes, Joe Grasso calls Bill and tells him, “You’re a dead man.” Bill mistakenly mentions Ronald Farber to the police at 123 minutes. Trish and the kids split at 129 minutes.

A look at the plot points above suggests that there are enough significant events occurring at regular intervals to maintain audience interest over the course of a very long and complicated film. In an interview in Filmmaker, Solondz discusses the ensemble structure of Happiness in practical and intuitive terms: “I had a bunch of different story ideas, and I couldn’t make up my mind which one I wanted to make a movie about. I wasn’t willing to do one over the other, so I figured out a way to combine them, hoping that they would cohere and play off each other.”

Even the three Jordan sisters, Solondz maintains, became a plot contrivance “to thread the different storylines together.” In the same interview Solondz insists the thematic links were of greater concern, and adds: “But I think the process of writing is a process of discovery.” Rather than diffusing dramatic tension and character, the elaborately intricate structure of Happiness actually allows Solondz to present a broader spectrum of suburban life. Despite having to juggle so many different characters, the film’s ultimate strength lies in its ability to create snapshot studies of this group of lonely suburbanites, who flounder about in manic searches for love and happiness.

Like Dollhouse’s Dawn Wienerdog who believes that sex with an older heart throb will make her popular, Billy views ejaculation as crucial to social acceptance by his peers. In a manner reminiscent of Dawn Wiener’s propensity to say or do something inappropriate, the film ends when Billy interrupts the family holiday dinner to share his excitement at his first orgasm. For this brief fleeting moment of happiness, Billy can overlook the sad events that have transpired around him and the future taunts that await him as a result of his father’s stigma. That Billy can exult in the fact that his ability to ejaculate makes him normal like other kids, but sexuality, as we witness throughout Happiness, turns out to be the root core of adult problems. The adult misfits who populate Happiness aspire to be loved and happy, but their efforts only leave them feeling more rejected and miserable.

Although the various characters in Happiness are given nearly equal screen time, Bill Maplewood’s story creates the dramatic glue that holds the other stories together for the simple reason that he has the most to lose. Lenny and Mona can divorce without any consequences. Helen’s masochistic obsession with an obscene phone caller does not have any bearing on her literary career. Joy’s affair with her Russian student, Vlad, will not get her fired or cause her to quit her ESL job, because teaching English to immigrants carries no emotional investment for her because she has no real direction to her life and is simply passing from job to job. On the contrary, Bill’s actions have serious and dramatic ramifications. His sexual abuse of minor children will not only ruin his professional career and break up his family, but stigmatize them forever. And while there is no allusion to it in the film – other than the symbolic closeup shot of Billy gazing at Johhny through the metal fence at the Little League game – his sexual transgressions will no doubt cause him to be locked up for a very long time.

Bill Maplewood is a homosexual version of Mr. Kasdan, the neighbor obsessed with Missy in Welcome to the Dollhouse. But whereas Mr. Kasdan’s kinkiness never got beyond the fantasy stage even after he kidnaps Missy, Bill Maplewood calculatingly follows through on his pedophilic fantasies by raping two of his son’s classmates. A seemingly reasoned professional and suburban family man, Bill is not beyond drugging Johnny Grasso during a sleep-over or stalking Ronald Farber, the Home Alone kid whose fatal mistake is bragging about the size of his penis. A walking time bomb, Bill Maplewood wreaks havoc on those around him, including his own son, Billy.

The scene where Billy interrogates his father about molesting his two classmates near the film’s end is one of the most disturbing scenes ever to appear in a movie. In an interview about the film in Indie magazine, Solondz provides his own spin on this painful-to-watch scene: “The boy becomes the psychologist and his father becomes the patient. The scene is crucial in any understanding of Bill the pedophile. He is not a monster, but he has a monster within him. He succumbs to his demon, and the only redemption for him is his honesty and openness with his son.” While it is certainly true that Bill’s honesty with his son is crucial, what seems even more remarkable is Bill’s lack of repentance. His admission that he would do the same thing again is perhaps indicative of his sickness, but it nevertheless contradicts the ordinary meaning of what is meant by “redemption.” And Bill’s additional incestuous admission will no doubt have a troubling effect on Billy.

Solondz’s characters go about their daily lives trying to balance enormous contradictions. In Happiness, sadomasochism has become the operative norm in relationships. The film’s opening scene becomes emblematic of this dynamic when the teary-eyed Andy gives Joy a reproduction pewter ashtray, only to snatch it back. Allen, the next character we meet, ups the ante. In his therapy session with Bill, he details the most violent and sadistic sexual fantasies about Helen, only to comment: “Not that I could ever actually . . . do that . . . See, if she only knew how I felt, how deep down I really cared for her, respected her, she would love me back.” When Joy visits Trish and tells her how terrible she feels because so much hostility is being directed toward her, Trish uses Joy’s vulnerable state to deflate her self-esteem even more completely. Her sisterly advice is laced with devastating cruelty.

Yet Joy seems to invite such behavior. After Vlad robs her guitar and CD player, he also tells her he loves her. But we’ve just seen signs of his love in Zhenia’s black eye and the bruises on her face. Low self-esteem and masochistic behavior seem to be a common thread linking the Jordan sisters together. In marrying a pedophile, Trish has set herself up for the most devastating punishment. Early in the film, Trish tells Bill her secret: “Like how come no matter how much you treat me like shit, I can’t help loving you even more.” She says this, presumably in an effort to arouse both herself and him sexually. And Helen, who laughs at Joy to her face, longs to be raped and abused.

Solondz breaks one of the cardinal rules of conventional dramatic screenwriting by not providing an external antagonist. There are no obstacles to be overcome as there are in most Hollywood films, which suggests that the film may have a gaping hole for a middle act. The characters do not battle outside obstacles or forces, but rather themselves. They are their own worst enemies; their various conflicts are fundamentally internal. Only Allen seems to go through any sort of psychological struggle over whether he should attempt to follow through on Helen’s demand that he have sex with her. But deep down, Allen already knows he’s hopelessly inadequate to the task.

Whereas the classical Hollywood paradigm depends on characters being able to make choices, Solondz replaces freedom of choice with a grim determinism. Happiness suggests that no matter what road these characters take, no matter what actions they choose, happiness ultimately will elude them. Their fates were long ago determined by their dysfunctional families, youthful peers, and the cultural forces that have shaped their contradictory, no-win desires.

Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah (2008) has been available on VOD through IFC, but I had a chance to catch the film on the big screen at the Orpheum Theatre last weekend. Even if you’re not a fan of gangster films, you owe it to yourself to see this revisionist epic. Set largely in and around a suburban Naples housing project that suggests a run-down Aztec-inspired LeFrak City, Gomorrah involves five different plot threads, but, unlike most ensemble films or network narratives, they never intersect. The film’s structure mirrors that of the Camorra, a crime organization bigger than the Mafia, whose tentacles extend into almost every level of Italian society and the global economy – toxic waste disposal, sex clubs and prostitution, arms trafficking, loan sharking, and high fashion. The Camorra so permeates the fabric of everyday life in Naples that no one seems immune to the violence, which has resulted in four thousand deaths in Italy over the past thirty years.

The film opens with a dark blue-filtered shot inside a tanning booth. As the image gradually brightens, it feels as if we’ve entered a science fiction film, as the body of a gangster is illuminated by ultraviolet radiation. We glimpse four gangsters as they joke, tan artificially, and one gets a manicure, only to get blown away in quick, methodical fashion by their rivals. The prologue serves as a apt metaphor for what follows – in ways that will only become obvious to us later on. Whereas classic gangster films usually emphasize honor and loyalty to family, clan, and country, the world mapped by Gomorrah is one marked by betrayal. All traditional values have been leveled – it’s only money that motivates anyone’s actions. Even those on the dole – the families of gangsters who receive regular payments – complain about the cheapness of the crime boss.

We follow five major characters. Toto (Salvatore Abruzzese) is a thirteen-year-old boy who delivers groceries for his single mom in the sprawling housing complex. He’s a good kid at heart, but survival in such an environment demands that one must eventually choose sides between warring clan factions. There’s an intense scene where the mobsters test Toto’s courage and manhood by shooting him at close range while he wears a large chest protector. Toto survives, but later stares in the mirror and fingers the purple bruise left by the bullet.

Other major characters include Pasquale (Salvatore Cantalupo), a tailor making high-fashion knockoffs in an mob-financed Italian sweatshop. He accepts a bribe from Chinese competitors and secretly switches sides. The Camorra accountant Don Ciro (Gianfelice Imparato) goes from family to family with subsidies, but he has no loyalty either – he’s merely following the list he’s been given and doing what he’s told. When the going gets rough, he seeks an accommodation with the opposition. There’s also Roberto (Carmine Paternoster), who starts working for a waste management firm. He watches as his boss Franco (Toni Servillo), who wears suits and looks very much like a legitimate businessman, hires young kids to drive toxic material and illegally dumps it on nearby land with disastrous consequences. In a scene near the end, we see the effects on a man dying of cancer (which we learn in the end credits has increased in the area by twenty percent).

As the Roberto and Franco drive back, Roberto becomes disgusted and indicates he’s not cut out for the business. The two get into a heated exchange on the side of the road:

FRANCO: You think this job sucks? You know guys like me put this shit country in Europe? Know how many workers I’ve helped by saving their companies money?
Franco chases after Roberto and points to the green farm land.
FRANCO (Cont.) Stop and look. What do you see? Debts. All these people have been saved only thanks to us.
ROBERTO: I saw how you helped them live. You save a worker in Mestre and kill a family in Mondragone.
FRANCO: That’s how it works, but I didn’t decide it. We solve problems created by others. I didn’t create chromium and asbestos, I didn’t dig up the mountain. That’s how it works.
ROBERTO: That’s how it works? I don’t work that way. I’m not like you.
FRANCO: What are you like?
ROBERTO: I’m different.
Roberto walks away from the older man.
FRANCO: Go make pizzas!

Franco’s rationalization for his criminal behavior suggests how ingrained such a cynical mentality has become, which is precisely what feeds and sustains the operations of the Camorra.

The two most colorful characters in Gommorah are two teenage knuckleheads – Ciro (Ciro Petrone), aka “Sweet Pea,” a gangly kid with a crew cut and prominent nose, and his pal Marco (Marco Macor), whose voice sounds as if his larynx is caught in a vice grip. To the annoyance of the local area crime boss, the two fantasize they’re characters right out of Brian De Palma’s Scarface. These hopeless romantics naively believe they can outsmart the real gangsters. Marco is bit crazy, while Sweet Pea might easily be nicknamed “Pea Brain.” The two ridicule the local crime boss, rob African coke dealers and later a pool hall, and steal a cache of arms from the mobsters. At one point, as the two walk along the beach in their skivvies and sneakers, they shoot high-powered weapons and inadvertently blow up a boat on the opposite shore. Without the comedic charm and goofy shenanigans of Marco and Sweet Pea – Garrone compares them to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza – the film would feel much more like the grim exposé it actually is.

Garrone uses a nervous hand-held steadicam to probe the characters and events in the story. The brutalist architecture of the housing complex defines its inhabitants, suggesting at various times the inside of a prison. His camera moves fluidly around characters and back and forth between them as they speak, giving the film a documentary-like quality. Yet certain scenes such as the tanning booth and sex club are highly stylized through the use of colored gels. And when Pasquale pays a visit to the Chinese competitor, the inside of the factory building is bathed in a orange light that suggests he’s entering hell – a hell within hell. There’s one shot, however, when the mob shoots up the car carrying Pasquale, and it careens into a garden full of reproductions of Roman statues that would make Manny Farber turn over in his grave. For me, it’s the only false stylistic note in an otherwise compelling story of how crime has infiltrated virtually every aspect of the lives of these characters.

It’s no wonder that Roberto Saviano, the author of the 2006 book on which Garrone’s film is based, has been under continual police protection. Garrone, however, has attempted to distance himself from Saviano, who apparently divulged Camorra secrets while on publicity tours. Garrone told an interviewer from LA Weekly: “It’s terrible what’s happened to him, but he made a pact with the Devil, to have a best-seller.” Garrone’s Gomorrah has grossed nearly $34 million at the box office worldwide, but only $1.5 million in the U.S. thus far. It hasn’t helped that the film was somehow passed over for an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Picture. Anyone who sees Gomorrah – and it’s not been exactly been easy in this country – will surely wonder why.

Note to local readers: I’m happy to report that Gomorrah is being held over for a second week at the Orpheum. 

Seeing Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light (Stellet Licht) for a second time at the Wisconsin Film Festival yesterday morning only confirmed that it’s a truly great film. What surprised me, however, was how much more emotional this formal and austere film seemed on a second viewing. Reygadas somehow manages to imbue each scene with a sense of magical or ecstatic wonder – how is he able to do this? – only to set the viewer up for the intense internal conflict that his main characters suffer throughout the film.

The film begins with a spectacular opening shot that moves from a cosmic starry night to the break of dawn on a rural landscape, which suggests that we might be witnessing creation. Set in a Mennonite community in rural Mexico where Plautdietsch is spoken, the story turns out to be remarkably simple. We watch Johan (Cornelio Wall) and Esther (Miriam Toews) with their brood of six children at breakfast. They seem like a normal, happy, and religious farm family, but once everyone leaves except for Johan, the camera moves closer and he sobs uncontrollably as he sits at the empty table.

We learn right afterwards from a conversation with his auto mechanic friend Zacarias that Johan has renewed a love affair with a waitress named Marianne (Maria Pankratz). Zacarias encourages Johan to be true to his feelings and his destiny. Zacarias tells him: “Something very powerful has come over you. You’ve found the woman nature meant for you. Very few people know what that is.” After what seems like interminable silence, Johan explains that Marianne is the better woman for him. Zacarias suggests that this is something even sacred. A Spanish pop song shifts the mood of the scene from anguish to light-hearted joy as the camera follows Johan’s pickup truck as it drives in circular movements that suggest the power of sexual desire, while Johan sings along with the radio in anticipation of his tryst with Marianne. As Johan heads off, the camera holds on the shot until his truck disappears from the frame.

Reygadas cuts to a shot of a fantastic landscape that reminds me of certain paintings by Verne Dawson, punctuated by the sound of insects. In an extended take, the camera follows Johan’s feet as he tromps over yellow flowers in a field only to wind up on a woman’s leg. We see a medium shot of Johan and Marianne from the side as the two of them stare at each other longingly. She removes his cowboy hat, and they kiss passionately for nearly two minutes as light flares into the lens. Reygadas cuts to a shot of Johan showering inside a stone building afterwards. The camera heads into the dark space, in which his naked body moves in and out of shadow. Marianne will later remark after they make love again, “I smell of sex.”

Johan’s affair turns out not to be a secret to Esther. His inability to forsake his adulterous relationship is a source of pain for all three of the people involved. This is true in all romantic love triangles, of course, but it’s hardest on Esther, who remains a loving wife throughout the ordeal. It’s no wonder that she literally dies of a broken heart during an intense rain storm – as if nature is reflecting her inner turmoil and weeping as bitterly as her. The shot of her collapsed body at the trunk of a tree and her abandoned blue umbrella nearby is a particularly haunting image that lingers with us for a long time afterwards.

What follows – the direct reference to Dreyer’s masterful Ordet (1955) – remains a source of controversy among film critics and scholars. My esteemed colleague David Bordwell writes: “Ordet, suffused with religious debate, earns its miraculous finale, while Silent Light, for all its austerity, is a film of the flesh, and its spiritual coda seems to me somewhat forced. But I’m willing to be convinced otherwise.” Yet the theological fine points of the ending, at least for me, remain beside the point – I can live with the ambiguity. Whatever the case, Silent Light may be a film of the flesh, but it’s clear that the religious beliefs of the characters only heighten the sense of Johan and Marianne’s moral dilemma. Without the added contradictions of their religious beliefs, they wouldn’t suffer nearly as much.

When Johan later admits that he’s made a mistake in marrying Esther in comparison to his love for Marianne, truth be told, it’s really been compounded by six other mistakes born out of their union. And when, at Esther’s suggestion, Johan takes his kids with him when he visits Marianne at the restaurant and then slips off to have passionate sex with her, he’s really being downright sleazy, no matter what he tells himself. His brutal honesty with Esther about his actions with Marianne is actually a form of emotional torture.

Marianne announces that she’s breaking off their relationship afterwards. But as they rejoin his children who are watching TV in a van, Reygadas shoots them from behind, allowing us to view them clasping each other’s hand behind their backs. I always tells my film production students that you’re always looking for the very best place to put the camera within a scene, and damned if Reygadas doesn’t nail it every time – often in astonishing and incredibly unpredictable ways. This includes routinely flipping over the axis line. Rather than being jarring, here it seems like the most natural thing in the world.

Reygadas is not known to be a filmmaker who relies on a traditional script. His films aren’t written, but rather conceived in purely cinematic terms. Dialogue, for instance, is kept to a virtual minimum throughout the film – he often employs the power of silence over words. It’s hard to imagine how Reygadas manages to get such affecting performances from non-professional actors, but he tells his story primarily through images and sounds. Like Antonio Campos’s Afterschool (which played at the festival) and Lance Hammer’s Ballast, he also avoids non-diegetic music, so as not to manipulate the viewer’s feelings. Reygadas pushes each shot in Silent Light to its maximum potential. The stifling subtext of the situation allows him to create dramatic tension simply by extending the temporal duration of individual shots.

When Johan visits his preacher father to inform him of the affair and his dilemma, the scene begins with his elderly parents leading cows into the milking parlor in a wide shot. We watch as the father and mother go through the elaborate process. Johan turns up unexpectedly and tells his dad: “I fell in love with another woman.” Avoiding eye contact, his father comments, “You’re joking,” but nevertheless suggests that they go outside. When the door opens onto a snowy landscape, it gives us a surprising jolt. As the two take a walk into the field, the camera follows them from behind, allowing the sound of the crunching of their feet in the snow to enhance the dramatic tension. When they finally stop, the camera moves past them and pans across the landscape, suddenly transforming into a point-of-view shot. His father remarks, “Planting will be delayed this season, Johan,” suggesting an avoidance of the issue at hand. After the pan continues, the father finally asks whether Esther knows about it. The panning shot continues until it winds up framing them in a two-shot. Reygadas cuts to a wide shot of the landscape again, as the father suggests that they should go inside.

Reygadas uses the awkward silence between the two men to heighten the drama of Johan’s revelation. As Johan stares at a calendar on the wall, and Reygadas’s camera focuses on it, the father finally tells him, “What is happening to you is the work of the enemy, Johan.” His son answers, “I think it’s God’s doing.” Johan sits down and asks his father to help him sort out which woman he should love. The camera focuses on an extreme closeup of the father’s face that crops off his eyes, as he discusses falling for another woman shortly after Johan was born. He forced himself to break it off and counsels Johan that the feeling will pass. While not wishing to be in Johan’s shoes, he also admits to feeling a sense of envy. The father doesn’t offer advice, but suggests that if Johan doesn’t act quickly, he runs the risk of losing both woman.

Throughout Silent Light, Reygadas uses sounds of nature – birds, insects, and animals – to convey the sense of a world that feels incredibly animated. Esther comments on this just prior to the rain storm. She expresses nostalgia for the past when the two of them were happy. Esther tells Johan, “However way it was, just being next to you was the pure feeling of being alive. I was part of the world. Now I am separated from it.” After a long pause, Johan answers, “I feel the same.” She responds, “How I wish it were all a bad dream. To close and open my eyes and be back in that time, in that feeling.” Shortly after that, raindrops appear on the front windshield.

In Reygadas’s pantheistic vision, the world is indeed a miracle. It is we human beings who manage to torture ourselves and each other with our inexplicable desires, thereby turning an earthly paradise into our own private hells.

The Wisconsin Film Festival always has had a stellar lineup of outstanding films from around the world. This year is no exception. Two of the films from the 2008 festival – José Luis Guerín’s In the City of Sylvia and Jia Zhang-ke’s Still Life – were among my favorites of last year. Carlos Reygadas’s austere and Dreyer-inspired Silent Light (Stellet Licht), which is playing at this year’s festival, was another, so I very much look forward to an opportunity to see it again. A Mexican film about a Mennonite community in which people speak Plautdietsch and wear cowboy hats, Silent Light struck me as one of the weirdest films I’ve seen in quite some time. Yet Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata, which just played at the 2009 film festival, might challenge it for that distinction.

Tokyo Sonata begins like a typical art film – a family melodrama – but it slowly turns the genre on its head. During a storm, Ryuhei (Teruyuki Kagawa) loses his middle-management position at the Tanita Corporation through downsizing. Jobs are being shipped to China for economic reasons – sound familiar? – where three workers can be hired for the same salary as one Japanese employee. As might be expected given the culture, Ryuhei doesn’t want to lose face at home. Dressed in a business suit and carrying a briefcase that seems an appendage to his body, he pretends to go to work each day, but actually looks for jobs and hangs out at the library and in the park with the other unemployed men.

Ryuhei even meets a former high school chum named Kurosu (Kanji Tsuda), who at first fakes being a high-powered executive. He’s programmed his cell phone to ring five times an hour – he claims it calms his nerves – to simulate still being in the business world. The two men realize the truth about each other when Kurosu’s hunger forces him to head toward the free food line that’s been set up for the homeless. Suspecting that his wife is growing mistrustful, he later invites Ryuhei to his house for dinner to play the role of a business colleague. Kurosu’s worried wife asks Ryuhei to look after her husband once the ring of the cell phone interrupts dinner. Kurosu pretends it’s a call from the company president. Returning to the table, he chastises Ryuhei for his lack of diligence on a work project.

Ryuhei also comes home each day as if he’s been at work, but his family life has become completely dysfunctional. There is little ostensible warmth between Ryuhei and his wife, Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi). At the overcrowded employment office, Ryuhei is offered menial positions instead of the administrative post he desires. When he does land a job interview at a corporation, he’s asked what skills he can contribute to the new company. Ryuhei is so unprepared for the interview that he seems stumped by the question. He mentions being able to sing karaoke. Needless to say, the young interviewer berates him in almost as humiliating a fashion as Chad does to the intern, Keith, in Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men (1997). Kurosawa at least spares us by cutting the scene abruptly. Ryuhei explodes in the park afterwards, as Kurosu compares the two of them to a sinking ship. “The lifeboats are gone,” he tells Ryuehi – a remark that foreshadows the fate of Korosu and his wife later on. To survive, Ryuhei is forced to take a job in the cleaning crew at the local shopping mall.

As might be expected, Ryuhei’s younger son, Kenji (Kai Inowaki), already has started to act out. When he gets in trouble for passing manga during class at school, the teacher makes him stand in the back of the room. Kenji becomes angry that he’s unfairly being singled out and retaliates by announcing that he’s seen the male teacher reading porn manga on the train. One of Kenji’s peers later congratulates him for fomenting a “revolution” that has caused the teacher to lose his authority over them. When Kenji apologizes, the teacher suggests an accommodation – he wants nothing to do with his student. Kenji also announces to his family during dinner that he wants to play piano. Most families would be thrilled, but the tyrannical Ryuhei rejects it as a whim. In a parallel to his father’s duplicitous behavior, Kenji uses his lunch money to takes piano lessons with an attractive and recently divorced female teacher, Kaneko (Haruka Igawa), whom he has eyed previously on the way home from school.

Meanwhile the older son, Takashi (Yu Koyanagi), whom the parents view as a “mess,” seeks to join the American army in order to create happiness through world peace. His family wants him to stay home. Against his father’s wishes, Takashi goes off to war, but comes back suffering from post-traumatic stress. In Tom Quinn’s The New Year Parade (also playing at the festival), the family disintegrates under the strain of divorce, but here the family crumbles under the duress of staying together.

In Tokyo Sonata, we sense that there’s something wrong with this picture, as evidenced by the trains that whisk by outside the window of the family’s modest dwelling. Megumi plays the faithful housewife, constrained by sexism and tradition as she welcomes the other family members home, cooks and cleans, and quietly endures. At one point, she extends her arms and asks Ryuhei to lift her off the sofa, but her plea goes unheard. As the shot focuses on her arms, she pleads, “Somebody, please pull me up.” Kurosawa cuts and then holds on a closeup of her face. Megumi discovers her husband’s secret one day, but after he beats Kenji she finally confronts Ryuhei and defiantly tells him, ”Screw your authority.” When she later runs into Ryuhei, dressed in his red jumpsuit, at the mall, he runs off and the film flashes back three hours earlier in time. It’s at this point – nearly two-thirds of the way through – that the film goes bonkers.

Conventional dramatic films depend on believable character motivation, but once a masked thief (Koji Yakusho) tries to rob Megumi at knife-point in her home, these characters suddenly become capable of doing just about anything. As sirens blare outside, the thief takes off his ski mask by mistake, thereby revealing his identity. He then takes Megumi hostage in a stolen car. After the film loops back to the present – where she bumps into her husband at the mall – Megumi transforms into a verison of Patty Hearst. She tells the stunned thief who tries to let her go, “I’ve come this far, I can’t go home now.” The two of them drive to the ocean where Megumi wonders aloud whether she can start over – the same question Ryuhei also ponders as he lies in the gutter.

The plot threads get nuttier and nuttier. The deranged thief at one point mistakes Megumi for God. In a spectacular moonlit wide-shot, the tide washes over Megumi as she lies on the shore. Meanwhile, Ryuhei gets hit by a car in a hit-and run-accident, leaving him in a heap on the side of the road. Kenji, whose bug-like eyes and mop of hair have made him look anything but the child prodigy his piano teacher claims him to be, gets finger-printed and thrown in jail as a “fare-cheater” for attempting to sneak onto a bus. It’s no wonder that the film’s Australian screenwriter Max Mannix, who thought he was doing an Ozu-like film, is upset by Kurosawa’s treatment of his original script. He told Edward Champion: “The original screenplay that I wrote didn’t ask the audience to trust me here and there, then suspend belief when it was convenient for me. The script I wrote was a consistent piece about what appeared to be an average family. An average family that could not communicate, love, or trust one another.”

Yet what’s truly mind-boggling here is that Kurosawa shifts the tone of this family melodrama with a totally straight face. That’s what gives the film its utterly uncanny quality. Kurosawa shoots Tokyo Sonata in wonderfully cluttered compositions. His cinematographer Akiko Ashizawa often lights the interior scenes with a mixture of warm oranges and cool greens and blues. In terms of color, some shots are divided exactly in half, or between foreground and background, or as a rectangles within a rectangle as a way of suggesting the internal contradictions within the family.

In most films, we usually sense the film’s ending, but this one appears to end multiple times – as if we’re in a dream from which we can’t seem to awaken. Throughout the film, I kept wondering about the film’s title especially because there wasn’t any evidence of Kenji’s musical talent. His own father scoffs at the notion of Kenji being a prodigy, and thinks the teacher is praising him for purely monetary reasons. The question finally does get answered.

As this country lurches toward increased unemployment – now over ten percent in seven states – a film like Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy (2008) seems to be a social commentary on these bleak economic times. And it’s not hard to read Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s brilliant and eccentric head-scratcher as a film that resonates in the same sort of way. Tokyo Sonata depicts the disastrous impact that losing a job can have not only on a person’s identity, but also the rippling effect that it can have on one’s entire family.

This year’s Wisconsin Film Festival features its strongest-ever lineup of independent narrative features. The most notable ones include Ronnie Bronstein’s late-addition Frownland (the director will be here in person), Antonio Campos’s Afterschool – both of which I’ve written about previously and made my list of best indie films of 2008 – Ramin Bahrani’s Goodbye Solo, Azazel Jacobs’s Momma’s Man, Sean Baker’s The Prince of Broadway, So Yong Kim’s Treeless Mountain, and Tom Quinn’s remarkable The New Year Parade. The New Year Parade won the Grand Prize at the 2008 Slamdance Film Festival and it’s no surprise in these tough economic times that the film still hasn’t found a distributor, so locals would be wise to catch it at the festival. The New Year Parade represents a terrific debut effort, and it may be another year before it sneaks into a local theater, turns up in your Netflix queue or the rack of your video store. In the current world of indie cinema, blink and you run the risk of missing out on the best new films being produced out there.

Tom Quinn, who is still a fourth-year MFA student in Temple’s very fine production program in media arts, has a made a film that – like other major indie filmmakers, such as David Gordon Green’s George Washington (Winston-Salem) and All the Real Girls (Asheville, North Carolina), Lance Hammer’s Ballast (Mississippi Delta), Aaron Katz’s Dance Party, USA (Portland) and Quiet City (Brooklyn), Jeff Nichols’s Shotgun Stories (Arkansas), Bahrani’s Chop Shop (Bronx) or Todd Rohal’s The Guatemalan Handshake (Harrisburg) – remains rooted in a regional aesthetic that captures the ethos of a particular place. In this case, The New Year Parade uses the backdrop of the annual Mummers Parade – a tradition that dates back to the seventeenth century – to explore the working-class neighborhood of Irish and Italians living in South Philadelphia.

Quinn interweaves his story about an Irish-Catholic family, the McMonoguls, disintegrating under the painful strain of divorce amidst the year-long preparations for the South Philadelphia String Band’s attempt to win the annual parade after finishing a very unlucky thirteenth the year before. That the band, under the captaincy of the father, Mike McMonogul (Andrew Conway), has decided to use a highly theatrical Egyptian theme offers an ironic comment on the film’s own celebration of ethnicity. When the massive floats and gaudily-attired band members finally make their way down the street, it’s a totally surreal sight.

There are more crosses in this film than in any other one in recent memory. Yet all the crosses don’t manage to keep the McMonogul family immune to issues of divorce, drinking, and adulterous, pre-marital, and teenage sex that pervade everyday life. When the parents’ impending divorce surfaces, Jack, a twenty-five-old bartender and musician, tries to fill his father’s shoes – both financially and emotionally – within the family. He remains critical of the band’s new strategy for winning the top prize at the parade, and resents his father’s retreat from the family into drinking and Mummery. His father later attacks Jack for being selfish and “playing man of the house.” (Although it’s the mother’s infidelity that causes the rupture, the two children remain loyal to her.)

Jack’s younger sister Kat, still in high school, tries to keep the family secret to herself. In a crucial scene early on, the camera focuses solely on her, as the disembodied offscreen voice of the school guidance counselor quizzes Kat about her emotional feelings regarding what’s going on with her family. Jennifer Welsh’s clipped responses, facial tics and gestures – especially the way she purses her mouth and tries to appear invisible – prove absolutely riveting. Welsh, a first-time performer, is amazingly natural in her role as a confused teenager. The guidance counselor suggests that she find a friend or someone with whom she can confide – a crucial piece of advice that will reverberate throughout the remainder of the film.

Quinn in many ways filters the story through Jack (Greg Lyons), whose Oedipal fantasies of betrayal in Mummery parallel that of his father in relation to the family. Jack stumbles into a relationship with a hairdresser named Julie (Irene Longshore), who seems not much older than his sixteen-year-old sister. There’s a wonderfully uncomfortable scene where the Julie and Kat wind up brushing their teeth together in the bathroom. Julie’s unexpected presence in the house comes as a surprise to Kat. Julie later tries to relate to her by asking whether Kat has a boyfriend and offering to be available to her for advice. Needless to say, this comes across as improbable as Detective Lu’s efforts to befriend Alex in Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park.

Although the film deals with the effects that divorced parents have on their offspring, Jack’s relationship with Julie seems far less problematic than Kat’s initial forays into intimacy – it’s really Kat’s character that has the most complexity. Kat takes up with a hockey player named Paul (Paul Blackway). When Paul learns she’s still a virgin, he convinces her to start taking birth control pills so the two of them can have sex. Meanwhile, she flirts with her more nerdy and handsome cohort in the school audio-visual club, Curtis (Tobias Segal), whose fidgety performance suggests that he doesn’t quite feel comfortable in his own skin. At a party, Paul tries to initiate sex with Kat in the bedroom, but she resists. He responds with steroidal venom: “I can fucking jerk off by myself. What the fuck do I need you for?”

Shortly afterwards, Kat responds by leading Curtis into the basement. She throws her arms around his neck and begins kissing him. A month later, as they are about to do their morning TV show, the stress between them becomes unbearable. Curtis alludes to their making out and asks: “Could we please just forget about it and be cool with each other. The tension is driving me nuts.” Under questioning from Kat, he concedes that he likes her, but she storms off in anger. Although there are clearly strong feelings between them, the film like All the Real Girls suggests that timing is everything. Kat later falls completely apart and tearfully spills her true feelings to Curtis.

What’s so unusual about The New Year Parade is that Quinn is not afraid to go for big drama. It’s hard to think of another recent indie film that risks being this emotional. Nonetheless, his film employs an episodic rather than dramatic structure. Quinn is more interested in mining the depths of individual moments rather than in bludgeoning us to death with plot contrivances. The New Year Parade, in fact, is very different from films by Sean Baker or Aaron Katz. Like these directors, he depends heavily on improvisation – he reportedly abandoned his 105-page written script in favor of improvised dialogue – but Quinn’s particular brand of naturalism is far more dramatically inspired, even if he flattens the overall arc of his story. Because the loosely structured story transpires over the course of a year, Quinn provides realistic interludes that are heavily reinforced by pop songs and mood music.

Quinn’s camera remains remarkably close to his characters during the most intimate scenes – to the point where it almost seems as if he’s shooting a documentary. He fragments the story into shorter shots rather than relying on extended takes. Quinn mixes together documentary scenes of South Philly – of real people and situations, such as shots of the neighborhood, the Mummers practicing and preparing for the parade, or locals dancing in the streets – with scripted scenes. Like Sean Baker, he shoots lots of footage, which is one of the benefits of digital technology. The budget was reportedly a mere $7000, even if it looks like a million bucks. The scenes of the Philly skyline, fireworks, and Christmas tree lights shows a rich and poetic aesthetic sense. Quinn gives as much weight to transitions and place as to his major dramatic scenes. The implosion of the venerable Veterans Stadium – the one-time home of the Phillies and Eagles – serves as an apt metaphor for the dissolution of the McMonogal family.

Quinn’s home-grown regionalism and exploration of Mummery represents an intricate part of the story of The New Year Parade in which his characters are inextricably bound up with a sense of place. Quinn appears to be quite philosophical about the current state of indies struggling in the marketplace by championing the benefits of regionalism. He told Filmmaker: “If the sky is momentarily drooping for large-scale independent film production and distribution, I find that liberating. The lack of money could encourage a boom in regional voices around the country and a new sense of self-reliance and independence. The tools are available and this generation is primed.”

A colleague recently suggested that last year hadn’t been a very good year for independent films, but I beg to disagree – 2008 was a great year for independent films. The problem is that if you live outside one of the major urban centers, most likely, you haven’t seen the best of them.

Chris Smith’s The Pool finally opened at Sundance Cinemas Madison yesterday and will run for a week, while Kelly Reichardt’s masterful Wendy and Lucy is scheduled to play at Sundance Cinemas March 6-12. Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park and Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely did have brief theatrical runs at the Orpheum Theatre, but were available via VOD first. Kent Mackenzie’s restored and re-released The Exiles played for one night at the UW Cinemathque, while Chop Shop and Shotgun Stories screened at the 2008 Wisconsin Film Festival. Antonio Campos’s Afterschool is scheduled to be shown at this year’s festival, but I’m not sure about the local fate of either Frownland or Ballast at this point.

The issue certainly isn’t the quality of independent films, but the difficulties indies are having in finding commercial distribution. After January’s Sundance Film Festival, Manohla Dargis of the New York Times wrote: “Films with no-name actors are a tough sell, as is anything considered too arty, brainy, bleak or dark, which is why much of the best work produced today either goes without American distribution or is released by smaller companies that don’t require huge returns.” I think that’s an accurate summation of the current state of affairs.

Whereas theatrical openings used to be a necessity in order to get a more lucrative DVD deal, that’s no longer the case. Unless the film does extremely well theatrically, smaller DVD companies are not in a position to offer very much in terms of up-front money. Why? Illegal downloads and piracy are two obvious factors. As the world economy continues to tank, there’s the notion that everything – books, music, movies – should be available for free. This makes it difficult for independent filmmakers and musicians as well as non-celebrity authors to be compensated for their labors. The business models are shifting in all these areas, so it will be interesting to see how this situation eventually will play out.

Whatever the case, on this weekend of both the Independent Spirit Awards and the Academy Awards, here is my personal list of the best indie films of 2008:

(Click on the titles below for extended commentary).

1. Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt)
2. Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant)
3. Mister Lonely (Harmony Korine)
4. Ballast (Lance Hammer)
5. Frownland (Ronald Bronstein)
6. The Exiles (Kent Mackenzie)
7. The Pool (Chris Smith)
8. Afterschool (Antonio Campos)
9. Shotgun Stories (Jeff Nichols)
10. Chop Shop (Ramin Bahrani)

If my list were extended to include international cinema, I definitely would have added such gems as José Luis Guerín’s structural narrative In the City of Sylvia (click here for commentary), Jia Zhang-ke’s Still Life, and Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light. The first two played at the 2008 Wisconsin Film Festival, while Reygadas’s film will play at this year’s festival in early April.

Lance Hammer’s first feature Ballast (2008), set in the Mississippi Delta, generated a great deal of critical buzz when it screened at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and Hammer wound up winning the Best Director award. Like the very best and most distinctive independent films being made today, Ballast represents a hard-sell in a glutted theatrical marketplace. Hammer initially accepted a distribution deal with IFC, but backed out of it and has been self-distributing the film. It’s not for me to judge whether this represents a wise decision or pure folly, but I respect Hammer’s integrity and his desire not to give his film away for nothing, especially after all the labor and effort it took to create such an extraordinary work.

After immersing himself in the setting for the film and doing extensive interviews with local residents, Hammer abandoned his initial screenplay because he it felt it was “too overt” or “untruthful.” He eventually wrote a new version, which was based on a series of photographs and very extensive notes, over the course of two years. Hammer then cast African-Americans who lived there to play the parts rather than professional actors. In an interview in Cineaste, he explains: “In a Bressonian fashion, I was interested in the physical characteristics of people, and physical comportment, the way a body moves in space, the way emotions animate the physical vessel you carry around on earth. You can tell the temperament of a person almost right away.”

Hammer did three months of scene-by-scene rehearsals on location. He would videotape the rehearsals, and what transpired in them would be transcribed into a “running draft.” The nonprofessional performers were never given the screenplay in order to memorize lines, although they sometimes were shown a scripted scene in order to grasp the basic idea of it. Hammer, who also cites Mike Leigh as a major influence, contends: “Because they [the actors] already had a general understanding of what was going on outside the scene at hand, but a foggy understanding of the scene itself, it would force them to respond as themselves. That was fun: It yielded many wonderful, realistic moments.”

Ballast indeed owes much to realism, yet the film manages to go far beyond its conventions by being austere, boldly visual, richly poetic, and rigorously formal. The film employs elliptical jump cuts and a documentary-like mobile camera that often pans rather than cuts between characters. Like Antonio Campos’s Afterschool, Ballast centers on a depressed protagonist, relies on only diegetic sound and avoids non-diegetic music. Cinematographer Lol Crowley (who won the Best Cinematography award at Sundance) does wonders with natural lighting, which gives the entire film a cool bluish cast.

Ballast begins with a hand-held shot of a twelve-year-old African-American boy named James (JimMyron Ross), who trudges through winter fields as we hear and see geese flying in the distance. He suddenly runs toward them, causing thousands to take flight, filling the sky and causing a tremendous cacophony of agitated noise. A white neighbor, John, turns up at a modest house, where Lawrence (Michael J. Smith Sr.) sits on the couch in a stupor. John puts his hand to his nose indicating a terrible stench. He goes inside and discovers the dead body of Darius, Lawrence’s twin brother, who has taken his own life. As John talks to the police on the phone, Lawrence leaves, and moments later we hear a gunshot, and emergency medics arrive and rush him to the hospital.

Ballast cuts between plot threads involving Lawrence recuperating at home and James, but Hammer withholds the type of exposition that’s usually provided in a film’s first-act setup, and only gradually parcels it out through the course of the film. He also forces us to focus our attention on discrete individual shots – small observed details – rather than on what would be considered more central in most other narratives. When John invites Lawrence to dinner, the camera follows Lawrence from behind in two separate shots as he approaches the house in a lumbering gait. There’s a brief shot of the two men as they eat in silence. We then watch as Lawrence walks down the stairs and passes his own dog Juneau (whom John has been boarding) on the way to the bathroom, without any sort of recognition. Lawrence’s despondency over the loss of his brother has deadened him to everything else around him. The point is reinforced by an extended shot of Lawrence washing his hands after using the toilet.

James steals Lawrence’s gun, then turns it on him. To our surprise, the giant hulk of a man reacts with total passivity. As James threatens Lawrence, their ensuing dialogue is remarkably banal. Unlike most movie dialogue, it feels invented on the spot.

JAMES: Did you call the police?
LAWRENCE: No.
James looks at the blood-splattered wall.
JAMES: That’s from the gun?
Lawrence doesn’t respond. James, moving around, sees a picture of a dog on the wall.
JAMES: Got a dog?
LAWRENCE: Yes.
JAMES: Where is it?
LAWRENCE: It’s at a neighbor’s.
JAMES: Is it a wolf?
LAWRENCE: It’s a half-wolf.
JAMES: Is he mean?
LAWRENCE: No

James then demands to see Lawrence’s gunshot wounds. In a striking juxtaposition, Hammer cuts from Lawrence’s gruesome scars to the boy being cuddled by his single-mother, Marlee (Tarra Riggs), as he watches television. When James goes to bed, he tells his mom he needs twenty dollars to play basketball at the community center. She doesn’t have it.

James pays a return visit to Lawrence, who addresses the boy by name this time, and robs the older man at gunpoint. When Lawrence doesn’t have enough cash, James forces him next door to get Darius’s money. James asks Lawrence details about Darius’s suicide, which leads to a startling revelation. James turns out to be Darius’s estranged son, who claims not to feel anything. He tells his uncle, “He was an asshole and a fucking coward.” Lawrence attempts to present his brother’s side of the story, but James only wants his father’s wallet.

James already has become a youth at risk, as he flirts with crack, guns, and crime, even though he lives in a rural area rather than an inner city. When older kids attempt to take advantage of him, he’s not afraid to flash his uncle’s gun, but that only leads to more trouble. James once again attempts to shake down Lawrence, who finally snatches the weapon away from him. After drug dealers beat James and Marlee on a rural road, she flees their trailer in a panic, brazenly takes possession of Darius’s house, and threatens to sell the two brothers’ convenience store. It shows the depths of her animosity towards her ex-husband and his twin.

What follows is battle of wills between the aggressive Marlee and the passive Lawrence, whose recovery is signaled by his repossession of Juneau. When James informs his uncle that his mother doesn’t have any money, Lawrence takes him to his store where they stock up on non-perishable food. As the two go for a walk with Juneau – the dog becomes a vehicle for James to bond with his uncle – Lawrence mentions that Marlee had taken legal action to prevent Darius from seeing James. When the volatile Marlee finds out, she explodes at Lawrence, allowing us to fathom the ugly dynamic of blame in a bad marriage gone sour. Marlee tells him, “He left us like a fucking cow!”

Throughout the last third of Ballast reconciliation hangs in the balance. The tenuous process begins when Marlee decides to run the convenience store. Lawrence at first refuses to help, gradually softens, and then asks to be left alone. Hammer resorts to visual storytelling rather than dialogue in several key scenes. When Lawrence finds the bullets to his gun missing, he grabs James and forces him to show where he’s hidden them. The emotional implications of the scene for all three principal characters reside in the image of the bullets lying in a puddle in a nearby field, followed by a shot of Lawrence as he silently returns to his house. The last shot of the film is so understated you might miss it. As Marlee and James initially drive off to school and pass Lawrence, a subtle cut and a pan inside the car provide all the resolution that’s necessary.

Ballast is an intense and somber mood piece, whose bleak and powerful images are not easily forgotten. Some of these include: shots of Lawrence as he sits smoking a cigarette, the rain water dripping off the roof of a building, Lawrence’s boots sloshing through the mud, the rhythmic movement of a windshield wiper while driving in rain, or James watching a train pass as he eats a snack. The Mississippi Delta very much functions like a central character. In a manner similar to Jeff Nichols’ Shotgun Stories, another regional film that was shot in southeast Arkansas, there’s an overriding sense in Ballast that the sheer desolation of the landscape contributes to the bitter enmity of the characters who inhabit it.

Maybe because two of Chris Smith’s earlier films have had the word “American” in their titles – American Job (1996) and American Movie (1999) – there seems to be something incongruous about the fact that his latest film, The Pool (2007), is an American independent film that takes place in Goa, India. If regionalism has been one of the many characteristics of indie cinema throughout its modern history, Chris Smith has expanded its scope to be more global – his film is in Hindi with English subtitles.

The genesis for the The Pool was a seven-page short story by Randy Russell originally set in Iowa. Smith distilled the central idea – one person’s obsession with another’s swimming pool – and transposed it to India. The Milwaukee-based filmmaker led a small crew to the ex-Portuguese capital city of Panaji, or Panjim as it’s translated in the film. Over the course of five months and 65 shooting days, he shot The Pool, which won a Special Jury Prize for “the most singular vision” at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, and then promptly drifted into distribution limbo – the fate of most great indie films these days. It opened belatedly at Film Forum in New York City this past September. The Pool currently is playing in other major cities around the country, and it’s scheduled to screen locally at the Sundance Cinemas Madison starting February 20.

Although most manual writers and screenwriting instructors haven’t taken much notice, many of the best independent filmmakers these days have moved away from relying on a conventional screenplay. All films, out of necessity, need to involve some sort of pre-planning – The Pool did have some form of a script – but the process of making the film was decidedly more open and flexible. Smith, like David Lynch with Inland Empire, began filming before actually having a final screenplay. While many scenes were scripted later, they evolved and changed during the process of making the film. Once the actors were cast – Jhangir Badshah was recruited as one of the two leads while working at a restaurant the crew frequented – Smith  incorporated the actors’ own life experiences as part of their characterizations. Smith would shoot a scene and editor Barry Poltermann would assemble a rough cut on the fly. They would view it and then proceed from there. In some ways, it could be described as a more documentary approach applied to narrative filmmaking, and the resulting film represents an amazing accomplishment.

The Pool tells the story of Venkatesh (Venkatesh Chavan), an eighteen-year-old hotel worker, who becomes obsessed with the swimming pool of a wealthy Mumbai businessman, Nana (Nana Patekar), who vacations with his disaffected teenage daughter, Ayesha (Ayesha Mohan), in Panjim. The film begins with Venkatesh returning from a visit home. We see him riding the crowded bus, and arriving back to the hotel where, while hanging laundry, he kids a hefty co-worker named Malcolm (Malcolm Faria) about being unable to find him a wife because of his weight. But Venkatesh’s real friend turns out to be a pint-sized, eleven-year-old restaurant worker named Jhangir, who’s also his partner in hawking plastic bags around town – a small business venture that comes to an abrupt halt later in the film when plastic becomes banned.

Most films employ scenes that loudly announce their significance, but Smith’s film is so understated and subtle that most viewers might not notice. In a scene where Jhangir cleans the fish tank in the apartment of a wealthy boxer, Venkatesh reflects on their need to go to school. Venkatesh asks Jhangir what he’d study. He responds, “I’d be an engineer. I’d make big bridges and buildings.” When Venkatesh asks off-handedly whether he would build him a house, the young boy answers, “Yeah man, I’ll make one for you.” It’s a throwaway line. Shortly afterwards, Venkatesh becomes obsessed with the fluorescent blue swimming pool, even though Jhangir remains a skeptical critic. He thinks Venkatesh should sneak into the pool for a cool swim, but Venkatesh schemes to ingratiate himself with the owner instead. Even though he’s illiterate, Venkatesh buys a book about gardening, convinces Malcolm to read it to him, and positions himself to offer assistance when Nana visits a local nursery to buy plants.

Venkatesh’s initial relationship with Nana is one of master and servant. Nana is cold and aloof, and dismisses Venkatesh’s questions and personal revelations with few words. But he gradually warms to his new hired helper – whom he’s aware has been spying on him from a mango tree overlooking his property – and even encourages him to attend school once he discovers he possesses good math skills. Venkatesh also tries to get to know Ayesha, but – with her designer jeans, shoulder tattoo, obsession with reading, and airs of class privilege – she’s as sullen with him as she is with her father. When Jhangir wants to know whether she’s “hot,” Venkatesh arranges for him to judge for himself. The two approach her as she reads a book in the park, but she ignores their attempts to befriend her. As they buy Ayesha some chai and a fried samosa from an outdoor vendor, Jhangir asks, “What’s her problem?” He thinks she seems pretty weird – maybe even a bit crazy.

Through Venkatesh’s sheer persistence, the three of them begin to hang out together. Venkatesh and Ayesha view each other across a chasm of class differences. Whereas Venkatesh and Jhangir love the taste of fried food, Ayesha prefers fruit. When she asks Venkatesh whether he has a girlfriend, he tells her that he already has an arranged marriage – to someone who turns out to be only ten. Ayesha reacts with disbelief. She asks him, “What if you don’t like her when she grows up?” Venkatesh and Jhangir also invent things about themselves as a way of embellishing their routine lives. Jhanghir claims to want to go to America because he knows an American girl, while Venkatesh tells Ayesha he has a friend with a boat and proceeds to offer her a ride.

Venkatesh also spins yarns as he works for Nana. He talks about killing and eating rabbits while hunting in his village. He also tells Nana about drinking blood and being possessed by a female ghost for six months, which caused him to eat huge amounts of food before the fat spirit inside him finally was able to be exorcized. He also tells Nana about a fight, which sent him to jail for three days. His tales, whether true or invented, serve to show that he and his wealthy boss and daughter, for all practical purposes, live in alternate universes. When Venkatesh comments to Jhangir that he thinks Ayesha is sexy, Janghir sees the absurdity of his older friend’s desire. He responds, “Yeah . . . sexy. You two are meant for each other. You’re black and she’s white.” Jhangir adds, “I don’t like the way she wears those low-cut tops. She shouldn’t wear such skimpy tops.”

Yet, as Venkatesh, Jhangir, and Ayesha spend more time together, we even think a romance might be starting to blossom as she becomes more responsive. They visit an ancient fort and venture out into the harbor in a rented row boat. In the meantime, Nana offers to take Venkatesh to Mumbai where he can continue to work for him and attend school. On a bus trip to visit a forest that Venkatesh claims is inhabited by deadly monkey men, Ayesha brings up the plan to move to Mumbai, which comes as a complete surprise to Jhangir. She tells Venkatesh, “My dad’s an asshole. I don’t know how long it will take you to figure that out.” As they start to head into the forest, Janghir suddenly becomes scared and refuses to go further. When the two start to leave without him, he suddenly explodes in a jealous rage. Jhangir denounces Venkatesh to Ayesha as a stalker and opportunist, and the two friends end up in a fistfight, while Ayesha dismisses them as immature children. On the return journey, they all ride in separate seats on the bus.

Throughout the film, Venkatesh has become increasingly unhappy with his situation at the hotel. To Malcolm’s consternation, Venkatesh keeps showing up late for work. After Malcolm criticizes his singing, Venkatesh suggests turning on the TV, but Malcolm indicates it’s not permitted by the management. Venkatesh responds angrily, “Are you a human being or an egg?” Venkatesh later accidentally breaks a guest’s Walkman. He gives it to Jhangir to fix, but Malcolm ends up getting fired by the boss for stealing. Despite the fact it’s really Venkatesh’s fault that Malcolm gets blamed unjustly – Jhangir wonders why he doesn’t feel guilty – Venkatesh acts relieved that his critic is no longer there to bug him.

Nevertheless, Venkatesh agonizes over the decision of whether to go to Mumbai. He once again returns home where we see his impoverished rural roots in Karnataka (where the orphaned Jhangir is also from) and meet his mother and two sisters, one of whom is about to get married. His mother would like Venkatesh to move back. In most dramatic films, reconciliation between Venkatesh and Jhangir would be a difficult and extended process, but all it takes to reestablish their bond is another jar of chutney from Venkatesh’s mom. Ayesha is a different case altogether. Upon his return, Venkatesh attempts to give her a scrawny orange kitten as a gift. “I can’t keep it,” she tells him bluntly. To her bemusement, he abruptly abandons it in the park – it’s the same street cat we’ve glimpsed earlier – and he admits to her that it’s a stray he found. As they eat cake, she makes a personal revelation, but the scene ends in awkward silence.

Chris Smith, who also did his own superb 35mm cinematography, constructs The Pool as a series of vivid snapshots of these characters and the place they inhabit. Some scenes are short vignettes, with only several lines of dialogue. Smith is as much concerned with visual details – the rhythms of Venkatesh’s daily life – as with character. Or maybe it’s that the endless repetition of daily chores defines his existence. We see Venkatesh making up beds in the hotel, buying bread at the bakery, washing dishes in the kitchen, scrubbing the marbled floors and toilets, dealing with the laundry, opening and closing the heavy metal gate of the hotel each day.

One of major strengths of The Pool has to do with its complex characterizations. Of the two, Venkatesh is the dreamer, while Jhangir is much more of a pragmatist. It’s almost as if their relationship is based on a role reversal. In many ways, Jhangir really functions as the older brother – not the other way around. Venkatesh naively sees the pool as the solution to all of his life’s problems, but Nana and Ayesha both know better. It’s the reason why Ayesha is so sour and why her father, as Venkatesh describes him to Jhangir, often stares vacantly into space.

Nana Patekar is a famous Bollywood actor, but Venkatesh Chavan and Jhangir Badshah give outstanding performances for being non-professional actors. Both play their parts with a combination of concentration mixed with distraction, which adds to the naturalism. It is their bodily gestures that convey their characters as much as the words they say. When Nana brings up the proposal of going to Mumbai, Chavan taps his knee with his finger as a kind of nervous tic. Chavan’s not acting – he’s just being himself.

And there is something about Jhangir Badshah’s upright gait and the energetic way he swings his arms as he walks next to Venkatesh that suggests his fierce determination and survivor instincts. He also has a great laugh, most evident in the scene where Venkatesh tells him about some guy on the bus who couldn’t hold it and ends up defecating in his pants. There’s also a funny scene where Jhangir gets something in his eye as the two boys sip sodas on some steps. Venkatesh offers to take a look, then suddenly blows hard into Jhangir’s eye. The little kid responds, “Hey man! What the . . .?” The incident says everything there is to know about their relationship. In the scene where they say goodbye, Jhangir’s eyes flit momentarily up the street before shifting back to Venkatesh and his own inner feelings of sadness. It’s moments like this that suggest an authenticity that non-professionals often can bring to the screen.

The dialogue has the indirection of everyday conversation. In one scene, where Jhangir and Venkatesh discuss the pool, Jhangir asks Venkatesh whether he’s going to pick at his food or eat it. When they discuss Ayesha being sexy, Jhangir’s criticism of her “skimpy tops” seems like a non sequitur, especially when he follows it by suggesting, “She’s solid and cute. I’m starting to warm up to her.” Ayesha has some of the best lines in the film. After telling Nana to “fuck off,” he asks her where she’s going. She answers, “To kill someone.” It’s not just what the characters say, however, but the cadence of their responses. When Jhangir talks about wanting to be an engineer and to build big bridges and buildings, what comes out of his mouth sounds more like a Lettrist sound poem – as if we’ve suddenly become transported into Isou’s Venom and Eternity.

Barry Poltermann’s editing of The Pool is nothing short of remarkable, and this final cut, which differs from the one originally shown at the Sundance Film Festival, is the best I’ve seen. The post-production sound work by Didier Leplae and Joe Wong has impeccable nuance: the wind rustling through the vegetation when Venkatesh, Jhangir, and Ayesha visit the fort; the clown horns of street traffic which mark the passage of days; or the whir of a small bird as it darts through the frame that makes the last cut of the film even possible.

It wasn’t so long ago that the British film journal Sight & Sound did a cover story lamenting the sorry state of American indie cinema after a less than stellar Sundance Film Festival (as if that is the sole barometer of anything). Despite the current crisis in distribution – the fact that so many smaller companies have gone under – the independent films this year have been terrific. And Chris Smith’s The Pool certainly stands as one of the highlights.