Naked

Title: Naked
Release Date: 1993
Director: Mike Leigh

You awaken to a ruined land, a city in ruins, society eclipsed by its own heartbeat. The final scene of armageddon finally exploding to a halt, the billowing smoke and heavy clouds cast dark shadows across the land, death and decay taint the air with its menacing and grueling face. Wandering souls and haunted spirits are all that’s left; you are the lone heart in a bloodless world. The soundscape an apocalyptic dirge, somewhat reminiscent of a blind man choking on his own blood. The guttural gurgling of swollen tendons and rushing waves of heart lubricant slowly pounding down, teeth and tongue seeking refuge stuffed deep within the esophagus.

And then you awaken. You awaken to the brittle foundation of a broken, timeless home. A home without physical adherences or natural boundaries, a home free from the rules set forth by time. You scamper around the dirt-laden floor like a rat blinded by the doors light, a cowering child from a drunken father, a scattering bag of fallen marbles. You awaken. Welcome to purgatory.

Naked, Mike Leigh’s own methodical apocalyptic dirge, is a compelling, thought-provoking film that transcends well beyond anything I’ve ever seen. Take the rough edges and outer limits of your comprehensive scope of thought and articulate it into one of the most beautiful films ever put on negative. Naked is the story of Johnny, a stray mind wandering the streets of London and its surrounding back yards. He’s completely naked, not in the literal sense, of the enigmatic paradox society has sloped into. A society seemingly running on lucid dreams, when in reality, is stumbling around in the dark, groping around for something more tangible, or rather intangible. He’s deaths entrepreneur, a bureaucratic loner in the business of apocalyptic seething, a manifestation of the alluring fallacy projected forth by humanity. Johnny is unemployed and homeless, but one of the most intelligent social misfits London may never know. His macabre articulation of doomsday and disregarded rants of life and the wasted potential humanity is further proof that Johnny is no ordinary low life. His career choice seems to be unemployment, floating about the city as he stomps the light out of everyone’s candle.

Johnny, while pessimistic and downright arrogant, is the raw aggregation of existential hatred. He is the meaning of life; he is the very definition of what it means to survive. Nothing matters, nothing you say or do matters, nothing you create or destroy matters, nothing you change matters. You are not the sole center of the universe, you are nothing. Johnny, through his destructive yet lucent rants, tries his very best to explain the world outside of this little box we’re caged inside. Cowering in fear and drenched in ignorance, we deny anything that isn’t quite standard. Anything that questions our beliefs or our morals is completely void, no questions asked, no proof presented could change this. What are you living for? Are you living to hold tangible, physical, ‘real’ things in your hands? You work your time away, saving and spending, living and breathing, tasting and pissing. You recycle yourself to the problematic science of this materialistic world, comparing and contrasting, buying and selling. If you work to achieve status and currency, what do you live for? Are you just dying to live, or living to die?

As Johnny himself points out for us, you can read thousands of books, you can scour the earth for eternity, you can taste from the tree of life, yet all of your books and discussions and knowledge still won’t help you realize the true purpose of this life. We’re all aimlessly wandering around this uncharted and vapid labyrinth of illogical strings of events. Where it’s going nobody knows, where it stops is anyone’s guess. Life moves at an incomprehensible speed, the vastness and complexity of it is unparalleled by anything our minds could ever comprehend. Johnny is that minimalistic void in the foreground of our thoughts, that vicarious conundrum bouncing around whispering “I know…” His self-indulgence is justified in his maniacal state of consciousness, his aimless wandering and seemingly incoherent spouts of thought are completely and utterly perfect. He’s careless, hopeless, ceaseless.

I can’t say enough about Naked that would do it any justice. It seems as though I’m trying to justify a pessimistic view of humanity without penetrating the delusional state of ranting. This is a movie driven by reality, a movie that builds upon the thoughts that have already entered your stream of questions. Alienation and discontent riddle the exposed skin with gaping holes, but knowing that none of it matters anyway leaves you with a feeling of awareness. It may just be a movie, but this is your life. You are that hopeless ameba floating between the rivers of life. You are that touching soul wandering the rainy streets of some distant town, watching the faces in the crowd as they float by. You are hopeless, without repercussions, without true knowledge, without emotions or delegates or dreams. You continue to ponder and question and seek, yet the further you progress the farther you fall. Is life truly worth saving? No, it truly is not.

96%

Cries and Whispers

Title: Cries and Whispers
Release Date: 1972
Director: Ingmar Bergman

Ingmar Bergman is a director I’ve been desperately trying to grasp for quite awhile now. Maybe it’s his style, maybe it’s the momentum, maybe it’s the structure and general composition of the movies that I just don’t quite get. On paper, Ingmar Bergman is a director I should love. He’s subtle enough yet blatant enough with his message and his films usually deal with emotions and moments that I’m a fan of in other directors. Fanny and Alexander was excellent, both a lush, beautiful exploration of life’s crossroads and the problems and issues that arise out of certain thematic predicaments. Through A Glass Darkly was, while not as awe-inspiring as Fanny and Alexander, a tragic and passionate film that wove the abstruse mysteries of life and false beliefs into a foaming collage of happiness and order (however depressing the film may actually be). I came into Cries and Whispers expecting great things, yet was left with a feeling of discontent.

Let’s start with what I enjoyed about the film, as little as that was. The colors Bergman used were, right off the bat, heavy handed and wonderfully done. When I think of red, I think of passion, of friction, of hatred and burning emotion. All of these are present within the entire span of the film, whether it was within the characters themselves or showcased beyond the tangible world of actors and sets. Maybe it was just something I noticed, but red was the dominant color on the interior of almost everything, perhaps subtly displaying how candid each individual was behind their facade. Another aspect of the film I enjoyed was the unsettling and unspoken tragedy that has somehow ripped through the family. It seems as though there is some sort of sporadic and spontaneous event that lingered above each character, creating a sense of nervousness and trembling throughout the entire film.

And that’s where it ends. Everything else about the film either pissed me off or evoked an eye-roll or two. Let’s start with Bergman’s perhaps unintentional incapability to form any sort of storyline with the consistency and momentum required to progress the characters beyond card board cut outs. Maria was the most interesting character out of the bunch of hags, even if she was a self-indulgent whore who pranced about gaily as her husband bleeds to death and her flirtatious advances on the doctor are severally hindered. The housekeeper was a rigid and fanatical lesbian cooped up inside her weak mind, flopping her boobs out whenever her lady moaned deep enough. The ambiguity underlying these scenes are not strokes of genius, nor are they artistic or beautiful in anyway. They are bombastic portrayals of several lives entwined by a tragic situation and the meager feelings provoked by it. The conversations are laughable and blatantly pompous articulations of Bergman’s own tragic pathos.  There was no depth, no true sentiment behind anything any of the characters actually stated. Let’s not forget the uninspired self-mutilation scene and random, incoherent character flashes, complete with “cries and whispers”.

The cinematography of the film was also horrendously and laughably bad. Illogical, inert zooms on the characters broke the atmosphere one too many times. I’d be following a character, slowly and finally being immersed into the film, and suddenly, out of nowhere, the camera zooms up into one of the hags face like she’s got something super important to say. Usually they’d just be passing around a corner or daydreaming, nothing of interest to say and no emotion to display. The camera felt amateurish, like some low-budget horror soap opera on CBS. It captured the moments of emotion on the decline, lofted over couches and chairs, feebly marching around the corners touting itself as it blazed into the emotional battlefield Bergman had created. Or the crapfest it ended up being.

As hard as I want to enjoy Bergman, it seems his films just aren’t for me. It’s not that I ‘don’t get it’, nor is it that I don’t possess the emotional and intellectual capacity to fully understand his films. I do. What I don’t enjoy is how he bludgeons the viewer relentlessly with his uncanny ability to segment emotion, however confusing that may sound. His dissimulation of love and mismanagement of the frail emotions he’s lauded for absolutely bewilders me, considering how many films he has under his belt. The stories heart dwells and depends on the characters and the interaction they’re seemingly hindered by. Bergman, however, fumbled this ball miserably. Cries and Whispers is nothing more than an erogenous metaphor for the menstrual cycle, played out in a wooden house with red walls and lofty lesbians. Let’s pretend your emotional behemoth wasn’t simply Tampax propaganda Bergman, I’m willing to give you another shot.

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