Building Universes

I was at a well-attended screening of In a Lonely Place on Friday night, part of a Nicolas Ray series that's now closed at the Harvard Film Archive. Bogart plays a screenwriter who falls in love, but he's so screwed up that it might not work out. There's other stuff, but that's basically it. One favorite moment of mine was the "grapefruit" scene, in which the characters seem to acknowledge the fact that they are part of a love scene in a movie. While stopping short of breaking the fourth wall, the writing here has guts for making such suggestions; self-referential moments are usually absurd or even played for laughs, but this scene is small and stealthy, and it's warm too- it deepens the leads' relationship and helps us root for them. The other great sequence is the reckless car ride, which is low tech, except for a brief moment of good stunt driving, but played artfully enough to actually make me grab the armrest. The real function of this part, of course, is to show you how things are getting out of control, and it packs quite a punch to move the plot in that direction.

I don't know Ray's work very well, and I supposed that the various flourishes I noticed in this film were his signature. Yet in spite of the many personal touches, Ray was making a film that lived happily and entirely within an alternate universe that the Hollywood studios had already established. (Example of Ray falling in with the canon: Gloria Grahame is never shown in close-up or even medium shot without a filter, which makes no sense, because she was already smoking hot.) When I watch a Hollywood film from the 40's (give or take a few years), I may not know all that will happen in the story, but I have an excellent idea of how it will make me feel, what the mood will be like. Certain conventions of this period- and of the genre of "noir" in particular- are so reliable that they define a universe, and to watch a film of this period is to return to that familiar and comfortable place. This is particularly exciting if you haven't seen the film before- you get a cocktail of the familiar and the not, kind of like a dream in which you discover a room in your own home you simply failed to notice all these years.

I enjoy movies like this, but their function is to comfort, not to challenge. Yes, it's easy to swoon at the elegance and clean storytelling of those classics. But the era had to end, for the health of the medium. When Charles Laughton made Night of the Hunter, he wasn't trying to give people a comfortable evening out at the pictures. His work wasn't that of a craftsman working within the limits of a universe, as Ray's had been. He was out to dismantle the basic notions that were making the movie house such a cozy and dependable place to visit. That's the kind of film I actually love.

Following the feature was a television episode- I think it was GE Theater- directed by Ray, and starring Joseph Cotten. The plot was about a Dr. Moreau type in the Amazon, whose hut is discovered by an explorer separated from his party (Cotten). The armed resident, attended to by natives, forces Cotten at gunpoint to read Charles Dickens out loud to him for years, never allowing him to leave his compound. It occurred to me that the television drama represented a somewhat weaker, yet more greatly restricted, example of a universe- as a medium, its needs and restrictions were even more tyrannical, and the episode might as well have been directed by anyone. Ray's hand was all but invisible.

But building a universe is often an excellent idea. This occurred to me later still, while watching Ashes of Time, a film by Wong Kar Wai. Who else is excited just to be alive at the same time that Kar Wai is making these movies? The disorienting editing, the playing around with speed and frame rate, the unreliable narrators, the dreaminess, and not a little bit of noir revival- you always know when you're watching one of his films, even when it's Ashes of Time and it's about ancient China. His films could be about anything, but they all live in his universe, and it's full of alienation, energetic individualism, joyful and painful solitude, and boozy sexual longing, and that's what you're going to get. What is consistent is the feeling he evokes, and he does it with the whole environment of the films, much like what Warner Bros and Columbia once achieved with their brand. Kar Wai has in a sense boxed himself in, and the weaker My Blueberry Nights suggests that he may yet need to dismantle his own vision in order to progress. But the last 20 years of his work (if you haven't seen Chungking Express or In the Mood for Love, get your act together) are a reminder that knowing what you're going to get isn't necessarily a bad thing, that the same universe can be visited any number of times, and that such a ritual has as much potential as it ever did to deeply satisfy us.

By the way, Ashes of Time is incredible, even though the fans of the original version, which I never saw, are lamenting the changes made for the redux edition. The battle scenes are ferocious. A good overview can be found here:
http://www.seanax.com/tag/ashes-of-time/