I’m not sure if the term originated from Kim Ji-woon himself or from some publicist trying to market the film to international and genre audiences, but “kimchi western” has become the unofficial genre designation for The Good, The Bad, The Weird. But what, exactly, is a “kimchi western”?

Well, if Kim’s film is any indication, then it’s the sort of western where the main villain, with his coiffure, mascara, piercings, and stylish black suit, looks more apt to be slinging guitars in The Killers than slinging guns at high noon; where the villain’s gang looks like a mix of Road Warrior extras and hip-hop gangstas; where folks kill bugs by throwing knives at them, and then shoot their knives; where shootouts occur as our hero careens through the air on zip lines and elaborate pulley systems; and where diving helmets are just as appropriate for headgear as “ten gallon” hats.

Or to put it another way, it’s the sort of western where the style is the substance — and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Frankly, it’s a relief for me to be able to say that, because for years, I’ve never really been able to bring myself to like Kim Ji-woon’s films (e.g., The Foul King, A Tale of Two Sisters, A Bittersweet Life). I’ve always appreciated and admired those films — Kim is nothing if not a consummate stylist, and a film like A Bittersweet Life is great to watch for its visuals, cinematography, etc. — but I’ve never really enjoyed them. Visuals aside, they’ve never struck a deeper chord with me.

Which is not to say that The Good, The Bad, The Weird is all that deep or thought-provoking (though it does have its moments, including a tragic little coda). First and foremost, it is a lot of spectacle pulled off with a lot of flair and panache — and a little genre-tweaking cheekiness — and at the end of the day, that’s plenty for me.

As you might guess from the title, the film begins as a riff on Sergio Leone’s masterpiece. “The Good” (Jung Woo-sung, who made a big impression on me in 2001’s stunning Musa) is a noble bounty hunter and sharpshooter chasing after “The Bad”. “The Bad” (heartthrob Lee Byung-hun) is a vicious psychopath who has been hired to steal a treasure map being sent to a Japanese official, and plans a stunning train heist — the film’s first big action sequence, and immediate proof that Kim is going for broke here — to do so.

“The Weird” (Song Kang-ho, who provides nearly all of the film’s best moments) is a seemingly bumbling thief who happens to hit the same train begin targeted by “The Bad”, and makes off with the map with both “Bad” and “Good” in hot pursuit. “Weird” believes the map will lead him to a secret cache of Qing Dynasty treasure, but the reality is a bit more complicated, especially when other factions send their forces after the map, too.

Throw in a bunch of Manchurian bandits, a senile grandmother, an opium dealer, and the Japanese army, and you’ve got a film spiced through and through with interesting and humorous characters. However, the focus remains squarely on the titular trio, and it’s to Kim’s credit that the film rarely becomes chaotic or sprawling no matter how many individuals fill up the screen.

Throw in Kim’s customary sense of style, some amazing desert cinematography, and some impressive set design — at the time of its release, this was the most expensive South Korean film of all time — and it’s a feast for the eyes. (Though if the action scenes in the last two Bourne films left you feeling a little queasy, you might want to brace yourself before heading into this one.)

And finally, throw in copious amounts of Santa Esmeralda’s version of “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” (last heard in Kill Bill, Volume 1), Lee’s mugging and Song’s bumbling, and some stunning sequences (including a final chase across the Manchurian desert that grows larger and more ludicrous as it progresses), and you have a film that is a thrill to experience — a film where “style as substance” isn’t a disparagement, but rather an accurate summation in the very best sense possible.

Oh, and it’s a lot of fun, too.

One of my favorite movie review quotes comes from Chris Vognar’s review of Donnie Darko, in which he writes that Donnie Darko “may be too ambitious for a debut feature, but ambition and imagination still trump mediocrity any day of the week.” Over the years, that has become my “go-to” phrase to describe movies that may contain considerable flaws, but that are nevertheless enthralling, enchanting, and fascinating. Which is a perfect way to describe Jamin Winan’s Ink.

And just how is Ink too ambitious? I suppose that if you’re making a film that deals with dreamworlds, altered states of consciousness, and other planes of existence, you get a free pass to skip on a standard or linear narrative structure. Saying that might bring to mind such films as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Being John Malkovich, but Winans (who also wrote the film) is not quite Charlie Kaufman.

Ink is, to put it simply, jumbled, pitting together multiple narratives that exist within alternate timelines and states of existence. That certainly makes for a headtrip while watching the film, but it also means that the film occasionally collapses under the weight of its convoluted storyline. And it doesn’t help that Winans employs a fair amount of hyperkinetic editing during the movie’s action and chase sequences, editing that doesn’t so much thrill you as it does give you a headache.

But therein lies the rub: by employing a narrative structure that doesn’t make a lot of logical or rational sense (although it’d be interesting to see someone attempt to plot it out à la Primer), Winans frees his film to go for broke, emotionally speaking. Ink definitely wears its heart on its sleeve, and is packed with themes of redemption, guilt, forgiveness, the cancerous effects of materialism and pride, the importance of fathers, and the power of stories — to name a few. I was quite moved at several points during Ink; even if the film didn’t make the most logical sense, it certainly cut to the heart.

The danger then becomes that the film might go too far towards this end of the spectrum, and instead of drowning in narrative quicksand, end up drowning in melodrama, or even worse, come off as emotionally manipulative. Here, too, Winans’ “ambition and imagination” come in handy, by giving us glimpses of a larger mythology that cuts through any emotional sap by setting the viewer’s imagination ablaze.

In the world of Ink, there are two factions that watch over us when we sleep: Storytellers, who remind people of their value and worth via good dreams and memories; and Incubi, who infect people with fear, pride, and hatred via nightmares. These two factions constantly war with each other, striving for the souls of mankind — or at least, our self-esteem.

There are other entities in this world as well, including the Pathfinder, an indvidual “blinded by God” who is capable of hearing the beat of the world (which basically means that the coolest scene in the movie belongs to him) as well as the titular character, who kidnaps the (soul? mind? astral body?) of a young girl in order to become one of the Incubi for reasons unknown. The movie doesn’t explain all of this in tremendous detail but rather, gives viewers just enough hints and clues to draw us in and put our imagination to work. (For what it’s worth, part of me hopes that Winans explores the mythology of Ink some more, perhaps in other media.)

Bringing life to these hints and clues are the film’s impressive visuals. There’s no hiding or ignoring the film’s $250,000 budget. The special effects may not have much in the way of a Hollywood sheen, but that’s actually a good thing here. Their roughness and “kitchen sink” approach — such as the reversed film effect used to “reset” objects (e.g., chairs, tables, lamps) that are smashed during a dreamworld duel — gives them a sense of dimension and “earthiness” that makes the trippy scenes more believable than any display of multi-million dollar CGI could. This is especially true of the Incubi, who walk around in black leathery garb and hide their faces behind static-riddled viewscreens that accentuate their grotesque smiles. They bring to mind the most nightmarish elements of Gilliam and Jeunet, but on a shoestring budget.

Finally, there’s an extremely clever usage of soft focus cinematography, color palettes, and visual styles to help convey the film’s many alternate worlds. It’s a wonderful example of “show, don’t tell”, and it makes for some of Ink’s most arresting imagery, such as when the film cuts from a man walking absentmindedly through a hospital to the Storyteller/Incubi battle of which he is blissfully unaware even as it erupts around him. (If nothing else, it’s one of the most vivid representations of spiritual warfare I’ve seen.)

I first learned of Ink over a year ago and instantly added it to my “must see” list, based on the strength of its trailer (which I’ve embedded below). But real life kept preventing me from seeing it, even though it was sitting in my Netflix queue for a good portion of the intervening time. I’m sorry that it took me so long to see it, but I’m happy to say that it was worth the wait. Deeply heartfelt, with captivating visuals and indelible images, Ink handily sidesteps its flaws. Some might be put off by its narrative challenges, or even by its low budget look and feel, but I suspect that, for most viewers, those will ultimately fade away in light of what Winans’ “ambition and imagination” have achieved here.

Ink is now available on DVD and Blu-ray. You can also watch it via Netflix Streaming or Hulu.

Four pairs of eyes — or better, four gazes — create the frame in which a compelling, troubling drama plays out in The Secret in Their Eyes.

There’s the gaze of the dead woman, sprawled naked on the floor, her eyes staring blankly at the ceiling from a face bruised and bloodied.

This shocks and traumatizes the investigator, Benjamin (Ricardo Darin), who sees her lying there. It pulls his gaze away from his work, and more importantly, from his coworker, Irene (Soledad Villamil), who had previously inspired him with her spirit and beauty.

Then there is Irene’s gaze, focused on Benjamin, waiting to see if her own feelings are reciprocated. If they are not, she will move forward in a marriage of practicality. But if they are, you can bet that books will be swept from her desk in her eagerness to wrap herself around him.

Finally, there is the gaze of a suspicious fellow who appears with the victim in old photographs. It’s the gaze of a man distracted to the point of obsession.

Benjamin notices this gaze. While other investigators missed it altogether, he can read its implications.

So, postponing his true passion, Benjamin sets out to find this new suspect. He guesses that this documented gaze is the stare of a stalker… maybe even a killer.

And with the help of his best friend, the perpetually intoxicated Sandoval (Guillermo Francella), he chases the suspect to his mother’s home, where he might be hiding… and then to a riotous soccer stadium, where he could be anywhere in the roaring crowd. (The scene in the stadium is one of the greatest chase scenes ever filmed, as thrilling as anything in the whole Jason Bourne franchise, and as astonishing as the one-take wonders from Cuaron’s Children of Men.)

The Secret in Their Eyes runs backward and forward in all of these stories, turning what might have been just a two-hour episode of Law and Order: Argentina into a rich, literary tapestry. We witness young Benjamin flirting with Irene when she was his young assistant, and then we return to the complicated present, when Irene’s a judge and Benjamin’s a retired criminal investigator. It’s clear that they’re still in love, and that they both know it. But the soul-darkening rape-and-murder case has complicated their experience together. As Benjamin, looking back, decides to write down the sordid tale of the investigation that brought them together and tore them apart, he is finding his way through hurt and fear toward hope. But is it too late? Irene is married now, and the world is different now — scarred and wounded.

Set in Buenos Aires between 1974 and 2000, this is a story not only about Benjamin and Irene, but about Argentina.

Like last year’s great Argentinian feature, The Headless Woman, it’s about a country that must move forward after violent times that broke its heart. Can it move forward into hope and healing? The Headless Woman wasn’t so sure. That film’s central character remained so traumatized, so haunted by guilt, regret, and shame, that she will go on living in a prison of the past, walking like a ghost through a false future.

But The Secret in Their Eyes suggests that healing is possible for those who put their past to bed and go on, choosing love over fear and anger. And that is powerfully driven home through the parting images of one particular character who, unable to bury his grudge, becomes chained to misery and hatred.

Ricardo Darin is a marvelous lead. Looking like Argentina’s version of Joe Mantegna, he has a deep sadness in his irrepressible smile, effortlessly illustrating a character of substantial depth. He and his supporting cast members are an excellent ensemble, absolutely convincing throughout the range of scenes in the past and the present (with excellent makeup work that makes their aging quite convincing).

Francella’s portrayal of Sandoval — a part that could probably be played by a sad-eyed Dustin Hoffman in an American remake (which seems inevitable), or perhaps even Steve Carell in a turn of bittersweet comedy — makes him an essential part of the story. He’s both hilarious (his way of answering the phone is a great running gag) and heartbreaking as his drunken tantrums are occasionally interrupted by flashes of compassion and care for his brave friend. Pablo Rago plays Morales, the victim’s husband, and I have to wonder if his name suggests something about rigid “morality” and the insistence on justice. Rago, too, makes what might have been an incidental character into a crucial player. And Javier Godino as Gomez is sufficiently creepy, even though the storytellers resist the temptation to turn him into some kind of supervillain.

While The Secret in their Eyes is filmed in a rather matter-of-fact style, it is still a work of poetry as much as prose. The poetry comes not from the imagery — it’s filmed matter-of-factly, with the exception of the soccer-stadium sequence — but from the creative intertwining of the storylines, which makes the central romance as important, perhaps more so, than the murder mystery.

But one thing troubles me. Just as that brutally battered victim suffered because of someone who pursued her with no care for anything beyond what he wanted, so Benjamin, deciding to act very late in his life on his passion for Irene, is disregarding the fact that she is now married and has a family. Sure, love is the most important thing in the world. But love – true love – is not self-serving, nor does it narrow its vision to care for only what two people want. It considers all. And if Benjamin is going to pursue his lasting desires for Irene, what are we to think of the devastation that an affair might wreak upon a husband and children?

While Campanella’s film creates a romance for the ages, by concluding that there can be nothing more important than bringing these two together, it invites us to support an act that, while not nearly so egregious as a rape and a slaying, is still an act of selfishness and destruction.

This makes me wish that Campanella might find these characters irresistible. I don’t often say this, but I wish this could become a franchise. There’s much more to the story of Benjamin and Irene. They’d make a crackerjack crimefighting team, better than any of the turbulent romances dominating U.S. crime series (”Bones,” “Castle,” etc.) As a crime thriller, it could stand on par with the cases of Inspector Jane Tennyson in Prime Suspect, giving us a detailed tour of life in Argentina just as that series gave us a tour of crime-fighting in England. And it could also explore how the romantic passions of consenting adults can become complicated crimes of the heart.

And ye shall teach them your children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt write them upon the door posts of thine house, and upon thy gates: That your days may be multiplied, and the days of your children, in the land which the LORD sware unto your fathers to give them, as the days of heaven upon the earth. (Deuteronomy 11:19-21)

Most of what could be said about Badlands can be said of Days of Heaven. In many ways the film takes Kit and Holly from Malick’s previous film and reconfigures them for this new space in Bill and Abby, bracketed by references to silent cinema forms and allusions to the Bible. And behind all this is the legend of Malick himself, so exhausted by the production of Days of Heaven he simply disappeared from view, letting these two films speak for themselves over the next twenty years. As it moves a step closer to pure formality than the bare poetry of Badlands, I find it difficult to talk about, more accessible to language I share with others when walking through museums and talking about the paintings that we see.

I am enamored of awkwardly long shots of natural or industrial scenes. The opening to Herzog’s Heart of Glass, much of Roeg’s Walkabout, the middle bits of Ballard’s underappreciated Black Stallion, and P.T. Anderson’s derrick shots in There Will Be Blood are handy examples. But Malick’s lengthy shots of the fields, the life cycle of wheat and its harvest, set a high standard for such slow cinema. Giant agricultural machines hum along the furrows of crops, workers brushing behind through the golden stalks. Their scythes flick in sweeps across the fields. Large hoops of wheels rattle past, trains clatter, lines of men and women crest dry hills and sit to rest.

Thankfully, much of the film’s dialogue was scrapped for Linda’s halting voiceover, granting us more time to wander with Malick through echoes of Wyeth, Hopper, George Bellows, and perhaps further on after Benton and Wood is the later Van Gogh. The voiceover does not appeal to everyone, and feels like a weak spot in Malick’s creative logic. But I actually appreciate the distance this technique creates between me and the film for the same reason I like watching Sister Wendy talk about a particular painting. The voiceover becomes a helpful point of access.

At the center of the story is an image of Ruth (Abby) and Boaz (The Farmer) which is eventually ruined by the envy of Bill, Abby’s lover and partner in crime. And against this current of Ruth’s story is an allusion to Abraham and Sarah. Bill and Abby have fled Chicago with his young sister after he accidentally murders his boss, and decide to tell everyone they are brother and sister to just make things easier. In the Genesis 20 story this references, Abraham likewise claims that beautiful Sarah is his sister, lest the Philistines kill him and take her for themselves.

While the grace of the Ruth allusions unfold, the truth of the Abraham allusion dawns on The Farmer, eventually pitting him against Bill and shattering the perfect balance of the film’s many references. After all this is said and done, I have a hard time understanding what is referred to by “Days of Heaven” if it isn’t simply everything Abby and The Farmer could have achieved were it not for the con that began their relationship. Perhaps the film is driven by the same sense of prophetic justice that lurks at the heart of its biblical allusions.

The poetry of the film lies in the ambivalence of the land to the maneuverings of Abby and Bill. But eventually the land responds to their skullduggery with another biblical allusion, that of swarming locusts, a catastrophe made worse when The Farmer accidentally sets the crops on fire in his anger at Bill. The land burns through an incredible set of nocturnal edits, taking what the locusts had left. And the land, the foundational Malick poetry that has given their story context, has vanished – along with it the possibility of dwelling, which, at least according to Heidegger, is the goal of all poetry: “Poetry does not fly above and surmount the earth in order to escape it and hover over it. Poetry is what first brings man onto the earth, making him belong to it, and thus brings him into dwelling.”

There is an incredible sadness to The Farmer’s death, one that is bound up in the intensity of the film’s crafted beauty. It is so intent on directing us towards the logic of Malick’s poetry, towards the possibility of “dwelling” and catching a glimpse of true “days of heaven,” that when Bill kills The Farmer he ends every idea that the film imagined. This sadness may be exemplified in Malick’s biography, who simply drifted away for decades after editing Days of Heaven for two years. I can imagine him sitting there bewildered that Bill would be so foolish, watching hours of such perfectly natural footage vanish in a hectic gun battle.

I don’t envy anyone who sets out to make an H.P. Lovecraft film. When people think of unfilmable — or at best, extremely difficult to film — authors, such luminaries as James Joyce, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon usually top the list. However, I contend that Lovecraft is up there as well, and three reasons immediately spring to mind.

First, film is a visual medium, one where the cardinal rule is “show, don’t tell”. And yet, the joy of reading Lovecraft, indeed, the cornerstone to enjoying Lovecraft, I think, is Lovecraft’s telling of it, i.e., wading through his wierd language. Not his dialog, since most of his stories are essentially inner monologue and narration, but rather, his long, rolling sentences, undulating paragraphs, lofty cosmicist philosophizing, and ten-dollar synonyms for “weird” and “creepy”.

It certainly borders on macabre purple prose at times, but Lovecraft goes on and on with such conviction that you either dismiss it outright and move on to something else, or you just give in and enjoy it for the arcane, archaic pleasure that it is. A classic example:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden eons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things — in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain. I think that the professor, too, intended to keep silent regarding the part he knew, and that he would have destroyed his notes had not sudden death seized him.

Second, his stories are often first person accounts or take the form of long, dictated papers and diaries, full of narration in which his protagonists describe, in great detail, the cosmic and eldritch horrors that they have encountered. It’s a structure that if transferred “as is” to the silver screen brings with it all manner of first-person gimmickiness — you thought Wong Kar-Wai’s narration was heavy-handed. However, it works wonderfully on the printed page, conferring upon Lovecraft’s stories a sense of both authenticity and immediacy.

And finally, and perhaps the greatest challenge, is that Lovecraft’s mythmaking is so grandiose, so bizarre, and so otherworldly, particularly in his most celebrated stories (e.g., At the Mountains of Madness, The Call of Cthulhu), that filmmakers either need to go big or go home. Alien cities buried in Antarctica, strange islands whose geometries defy the very laws of mathematics, alien creatures of whom the briefest glimpse can drive the sturdiest soul stark raving mad — Lovecraft sets the bar high. It seems unlikely that even supremely imaginative directors, even one so gifted as Guillermo del Toro (who has been planning a version of At the Mountains of Madness for years), would be able to reach it. How do you create cosmic horrors capable of leaving their beholders insane, and do so convincingly without slipping into gory, violence-laden histrionics, or worse yet, goofiness?

All of this brings us to 2005’s The Call of Cthulhu. How does this little film, directed by Andrew Leman for the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society on what was almost certainly a shoestring budget, stand up to the aforementioned hurdles? To put it mildly, this little forty-seven minute gem of a film handily sweeps aside nearly all such hurdles to Lovecraft adaptations in one fell swoop, and for one simple reason: the filmmakers essentially made The Call of Cthulhu as the kind of film that Lovecraft might have seen in his day… a black and white silent  film.

It’s a simple aesthetic choice, but a brilliant one. The structure of a silent movie, with its intermingling of visual and textual elements, is perfect for the structure of Lovecraft’s storytelling. What’s more, the archaic look of the movie, which gives it the air of a long-lost cinematic artifact, jives well with the fact that Lovecraft’s stories were both obsessed with archaic relics and artifacts — Lovecraft looked more lovingly on previous civilizations than the one in which he lived — and that Lovecraft’s mode of storytelling itself has an archaic feel to it.

Storywise, the film is a pretty faithful retelling of Lovecraft’s most famous tale, which recounts a young man’s investigation into the diaries and journals of his professor uncle that dealt with the strange global cult of the titular deity. The film hops back and forth in time and spans the globe as the man narrates his attempts to put the pieces together, only to realize that his uncle was on to something horrifying. But try as he might, our protagonist can’t resist the lure of this forbidden knowledge even as it slowly drives him mad (natch).

The filmmakers’ choice to go black and white was also a masterstroke from a technical perspective. Filming in black and white allowed the filmmakers to worry less about the realism of the sets — which comes in very handy in the film’s climax, during which a group of hapless sailors explore the city of R’lyeh on an uncharted island (described by Lovecraft as possessing “vast angles and stone surfaces — surfaces too great to belong to any thing right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs”). Here, the filmmakers draw heavily from the aesthetics of 1920s German Expressionist cinema (e.g., The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), and the result is a set that looks more real and convincing — and alien — than anything created with CGI. (Incidentally, the film is completely 100% CGI.)

Unfortunately, the filmmakers stumble a bit when big bad Cthulhu is finally revealed and ventures forth from his crypt to wreak unholy havoc. I’ll be honest: the Great Old One looks more like a muppet than a cosmic horror as he lumbers forth into the sea, and it sort of kills the moment — which proves part of what I was saying earlier. But it’s only a slight misstep in a film that succeeds brilliantly and absolutely on so many other levels — as an adaptation, a spiritual homage, and on its own as a horror film.

More information, including trailers, can be found on the film’s homepage.

On a related note, the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society is currently turning The Whisperer in Darkness into a full-length feature, this time a talkie inspired by the classic 1930s Universal Pictures horror films. It looks to be another inspired decision, and another fine entry into the Lovecraft library.

Two things are certain about the legacy of Neon Genesis Evangelion. First, the fourteen years or so that have passed since its TV debut have done little, if anything, to diminish the shadow that it casts over the entire anime landscape. Indeed, nearly any anime title that involves giant robots, (young) characters struggling with psychological trauma and alienation, labyrinthine and esoteric conspiracies, and/or apocalyptic scenarios will inevitably be compared to Hideaki Anno’s series and run the risk of being dismissed as “Evangelion-lite”. (No offense, RahXephon and Argentosoma, but I’m looking in your general direction.)

And second, Gainax — the studio behind Evangelion — has done nearly everything in its power to capitalize on the series as a merchandising bonanza. If you thought Disney’s merchandising efforts were over the top, you ain’t seen nothing yet: Evangelion has spawned numerous video releases and reissues, manga (comic books) series, toys, video games, music releases, apparel, playing cards, lighters, plush figurines, coffee, snack foods, footwear, pachinko parlors, and even iPods.

So suffice to say, when Anno announced his intention to remake Evangelion as a tetralogy of movies with new storylines, new characters, and a completely new ending, there were probably more than a few anime fans and otaku who rolled their eyes and dismissed it as yet one more cash grab. But Evangelion’s allure and legacy are powerful forces, and its heady brew of teen angst, Freudian psychology, Kabbalah and Judeo-Christian imagery, and awesome robot-smashing action cannot be so easily dismissed (even if it doesn’t always make the most sense on paper).

Evangelion begins fifteen years after the “Second Impact”, a cataclysmic event that destroyed Antarctica, did irreparable damage to Earth’s environment, and wiped out half of humanity. But now, mankind faces an even greater threat: the “Angels”, strange monstrous beings whose existence was foretold by the Dead Sea Scrolls (cue the religious esoterica!) and who seem drawn to Tokyo-3, one of humanity’s last strongholds.

Unfortunately, Earth’s military might is nothing compared to the Angels’ power. Humanity’s only hope lies in the top secret organization Nerv (cue the esoteric conspiracies!) and its EVAs, giant robots (cue the robot-smashing action!) that can only be piloted by young teens (cue the teen angst!) born after the Second Impact. Shinji Ikari, the series’ protagonist, is one such teen. Summoned to Tokyo-3 by his father Gendo — who is Nerv’s commander and who abandoned him at a young age — Shinji is as un-heroic as you can imagine, a weak-willed young man with no self esteem or confidence whatsoever.

Torn between a desire to run from conflict and human contact, and a desperate need for approval and self-identity, Shinji agrees to pilot an EVA the day he arrives at Nerv HQ. And while he can’t remember anything from his dramatic battle with the strange Angel known as Sachiel, it’s quickly apparent that there’s more to this young teen, and his EVA, than previously thought.

It’s difficult to know how much to say about Evangelion. On the one hand, saying too little could easily cause others to dismiss the title as yet another “giant robot vs. monster of the week” title, the kind that permeates your local Best Buy’s anime section with cliché after cliché. But one of the pleasures of watching Evangelion — the series, anyway — is to see just how far down the rabbit hole Anno and Co. go, and I certainly don’t want to spoil that. With the new Evangelion tetralogy, Anno seems keenly aware of the dilemma. The so-called Rebuild of Evangelion is Anno’s attempt to create a definitive version of the series for a new time and era, one that is primarily focused for drawing new people into the franchise while simultaneously offering something both new and nostalgic for longtime fans.

Evangelion: 1.11 You Are (Not) Alone achieves mixed success in this endeavor. There’s no way to get around the fact that You Are (Not) Alone’s 100 minutes feels extremely episodic in nature. It’s a streamlined retelling of the original’s first six episodes, and unfortunately, what gets streamlined is that which built up the drama that kept people coming back in the series’ first third or so, during which it’s largely a routine “monster of the week” title. In other words, the characters — i.e., Shinji, Rei, Misato — feel far less developed. Of course, there’s every reason to believe that this will be corrected in the later films, but even so, what makes Evangelion so compelling is its characters’ plights and backstories, and you just don’t get that here beyond some surface-level pouting and father issues.

Things do pick up in the film’s final act with the attack of the Angel called Ramiel, a giant crystalline octahedron intent on drilling straight through the earth to the GeoFront, Nerv’s subterranean headquarters. And the movie’s final scenes imply that the second film, Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance, will diverge quite a bit from the original series, and truly shape up to be the original vision sought by Anno.

My feeling is that You Are (Not) Alone is primarily Anno’s attempt to placate the otaku who might otherwise be concerned by the thought of a rebuild; that it’s his attempt to show them that the rebuild is not completely doing away with everything they know and love. By starting off with what is essentially the first six episodes, and introducing few, if any, substantial new elements, You Are (Not) Alone has little to appeal to new viewers unless they already have some level of curiosity to finally check out an anime title that folks have been talking about for years. (But just between you and me, I’m a little skeptical that Anno’s rebuild will draw in too many new viewers: this is still Evangelion we’re talking about here.)

If this all sounds dismissive, let me clarify: I did enjoy the movie. For all of its flaws, it’s still Evangelion. And there are plenty of scenes that are simply awesome, and ought to appeal to any otaku worth their salt. The new series is not being done by Gainax, but rather by Studio Khara, a brand new company created just for the rebuild, and their work is astounding. The animation has been significantly cleaned up and CGI is used throughout quite well, from the awe-inspiring transformations of Tokyo-3 to Ramiel’s shapeshifting and devastating attacks. Visually, the movie remains faithful to the original series; it just looks a lot better — especially if you’re watching it on Blu-ray.

And there are classic Evangelion scenes strewn throughout You Are (Not) Alone that brought a smile to my face: the reveal of the GeoFront; Shinji’s first encounter with Pen-Pen; and his first view of the crucified Lilith, the source of human life and the reason behind the Angel’s attacks.

Ultimately, I like You Are (Not) Alone not so much for itself, but for what it represents: a stable (for all its flaws) foundation for a re-imagining of one of the most important anime titles of all time. It’s far too early to tell if Anno’s rebuild will be a success or not. Methinks that the second film — which, from all accounts, is where the deviation from the original series truly begins — will be a bigger indicator of ultimate success. But Evangelion has always been a title that is far greater than the sum of its parts (i.e., religious mysticism, conspiracies, teen melodrama, kick-ass robots), and nothing I saw in You Are (Not) Alone changes that assessment. However, we’ll need to wait several more years in order to see just how much greater this particular incarnation really is.

Note: I had initially planned to post this review in December of 2009 after watching the initial DVD release, Evangelion: 1.01 You Are (Not) Alone. However that release was plagued with several transfer issues (e.g., the night scenes in the final act were well nigh unwatchable). Those issues have been fixed with Evangelion: 1.11. Three minutes of footage have also been added, which doesn’t sound like much, but Evangelion: 1.11 does actually feel a little smoother and less episodic than its predecessor. If you’ve already seen Evangelion: 1.01, then I do recommend watching Evangelion: 1.11. In some ways, it really feels like a completely different, and better, movie, and not merely a shameless cash-grab by the producers.

The most disconcerting thing for me, coming to Bresson fresh, is his way of directing actors, which is apparently to discourage them from acting. I can get behind his reasoning in doing so — acting as traditionally practiced in film is manipulative, yes, and hardly naturalistic. And I can appreciate the idea of characters who aren’t performing for the audience so much as embodying the story. But I have difficulty with this in practice; no one in Balthazar ever seems to react to anything; at best they stare inscrutably at the camera or wander about the screen completely oblivious to a few hooligans wreaking havoc. I became convinced I was watching a film about passivity. I can’t imagine that same acting-free style working as well on, for example, A Man Escaped, which ought reasonably to be a film of some striving. I suppose I’ll find out. Here, at least, I find it helpful.

Much of Marie’s struggles are the product of her passively accepting Gerard’s moral choices as her own, and it is hard not to think of her, pitiable as she may be, as a failed moral agent. This contrasts with Balthazar, whose fate he cannot refuse, and whose longsuffering dignity is thus enobling. Though in many ways Marie and Balthazar walk similar paths, I pity Marie and almost admire Balthazar.

The relative lack of expression does have one other effect for me, and this may account for some of Bresson’s reputation as a “spiritual” director: it strikes me as basically liturgical. Characters recite their words, perform suddenly and with great intention their scripted actions, and then stand by until their role comes around again. Like liturgy, the actor is not performing but reciting, not acting but enacting. It is a strange thing that in the liturgy can we manage a Passion with so little passion. But it has the effect of removing the emphasis from the individual and allowing the drama to be somehow corporate. Can you translate this effect to film? I find that hard to believe; cinema seems like the most presentational medium, all pre-arranged and self-contained on its little screen. And yet. I for one will champion the experience of watching movies on the big screen even when the last theater is replaced with a download kiosk. There’s a corporate aspect there that’s hard to shake. But liturgy? I don’t know. There might be something to it.

Otherwise I found Balthazar’s cinematic virtues immediately appealing. It is a starkly handsome film, marked by effective shots like a chain in motion leading us slowly from the Gerard’s hand to the conclusion we dread, Balthazar being dragged. The dialogue — what little there is — doesn’t much bother with exposition, but the narrative details of the story come perfectly clear with a little time and attention. The film is actually quite plain and clear in its particulars, I think, and frustratingly opaque in the larger scheme of things.

By the film’s end, I can’t say I was moved — the acting really was emotionally offputting — but I can’t say I was unmoved, either. Its story is a sad one, and though the Netflix synopsis writers enthusiastically promise a “spiritual transcendence and redemption,” the film itself is not so clear. Balthazar ends his life in beauty, there is that, all of his abuse leading him in the end to lay with the sheep, with whom he is a kindred spirit. But Marie, despite the grace offered her, disappears into despair, and her father does not recant his pride, and Jacques goes away unmarried, and the mother loses her last companion. What are we to make of Balthazar’s presence in all of this? Bresson’s threading him into this tapestry of human suffering makes him important, but how? I admit I can’t shake the feeling he’s bearing it somehow. That his suffering is redemptive, that it is endured for love of others.

I don’t mean to turn Balthazar into a Jesus analogue, not really. Mostly Balthazar is just a donkey. But I live by a spiritual narrative that imbues such suffering with nobility, a long tradition of martyrs and ascetics and common saints who without protest forgive every slight. Bresson as a Catholic certainly acknowledged that tradition, and it’s hard not to feel it in every one of Balthazar’s abuses. The human world of Balthazar is terrible, and there is little respite in it. Nevertheless Balthazar takes his place among the lambs, not even as a reward — just the natural end of his journey. I cannot imagine watching the film’s final shot and not feeling warmed. How would the liturgy end it? Thanks be to God. Amen.

Well, trust me. You want to.

The Secret of Kells is a movie full to bursting with the pure potential of animation, an aesthetic experience so impeccably designed that style and substance are indistinguishable. The obvious of source of inspiration is the titular Book of Kells, a medieval Irish illuminated manuscript of the four gospels, and it’s honestly overwhelming to catalogue the various ways in which the book’s celtic knots, symbols and even narrative panelling inform the film’s design.

An image from the Book of Kells

Perhaps the best example comes midway through the film, when Brendan, the film’s protagonist, climbs his way through the forest outside of Kells, and the environment abstracts itself into a kind of decorative motif, with branches twisting around like frames and creatures dotting the landscape with arabesque precision. Not only is it impressive, it’s beautiful, achingly so, and I admit my poor graphic designer’s eyes were misty. The characters themselves, while not an exact adaptation of the illuminators’ style, are as well-suited to flattened, abstract compositions as they are to fully dimensional environments, no small feat. It’s part of the animators’ larger attention to shapes and spaces, another nod to their source material: trees grow in interlocking patterns, and the monks gather together in groups that piece together their various exaggerated shapes like a puzzle. The animators’ repurposing of the illuminators’ art suggests that the only way to really understand their world is through the art they gave us, which reinforces the film’s conviction that art is what illuminates and interprets our world.

Brendan and Aisling explore the forest.

The design is integral to the film’s other themes as well. It codes the film’s battle between civilization and barbarism not simply as might versus right, but as beauty versus ugliness, order versus chaos and especially organic versus sterile. The Book of Kells, and hence the kind of civilization it represents, detailed and full of natural curves and patterns. The film’s icons of destruction — both the northmen and the “dark one” — are rendered in straight, harsh geometries, silhouettes and awkward scribble.

The story itself, admittedly, is less sublime: here’s a plucky young apprentice hero defying authority to do what’s right, develop his full potential and defeat the forces of darkness. But the whole affair is more complicated than the typical anti-authoritarian (and occasionally anti-religious) vindication in which such films normally indulge. The abbot, for all his stereotypical severity, has a compelling reason for his concerns — he wants to ensure Kells is well-defended against the encroaching hordes of “northmen” who are ravaging Ireland. He works nobly and sacrificially on behalf of both his community, and in the end both he and Brendan contribute, in their opposing ways, to the preservation of Irish civilization, though the historical facts of the situation necessitate that their victories be small. Ultimately, the film wants to suggest that survival depends not on shutting out the outside world — hence its depiction of the abbot’s plans in those harsh geometries mentioned above. Rather, survival comes from enlightening the outside world, building connections and sharing hope, which is at least true to the spirit of the medieval monastery. The literal specificity of the situation — this book is more important those walls — at least keeps the whole thing from devolving into a collection of truisms.

More subtle is the film’s treatment of its necessarily religious concerns. The actual contents of the Book of Kells, the gospels, are never made explicit — at best the film gives us Brother Aidann saying that the contents must be transmitted “so that the people may have hope in these dark times.” But the monks and the abbey are recognizably Christian, with attendant crosses and chapels, prayers and sacred music. That creates some tension, though not as much as you’d suspect, given that much of the plot hinges on the faerie world of the outside forest. Interestingly, Brendan believes with no hesitation in faeries, but is deeply the skeptical about Crom Cruach, a kind of dark god that haunts the forest.

The incorporation and demonization of folk belief are both as old as the Christian faith, and it’s not difficult to imagine that for many of the monks of medieval Ireland, there was no serious dissonance between the trinitarian God they worshipped and the faeries outside the abbey walls. And while there’s no explicitly Lewisian baptizing of the pagan myths, the film aesthetically ties the two, not just in making the natural world mirror the illuminated manuscript or vice versa but also by countless small details, working trinitarian symbols into the forest trees and crosses in the place of snowflakes, descending gently onto the earth. Aisling, Brendan’s fairy friend, is as delightful a pagan creature as you’re likely to meet, but she sides herself quite clearly with Kells and its mission. You can interpret that as you wish — softening the Book of Kells into a syncretistic gaelic mythology or trumpeting the divine spirit that animates the world. But in this ambiguity the film at least allows for the give-and-take that must have been going on within the Irish soul. That it does this largely through aesthetic choices — this film is all aesthetic choices — is a matter of no small commendation.

Ultimately, inasmuch as the Oscar for Best Animated Feature is an award for the best film that happens to animated, The Secret of Kells likely stands no chance. Up is the obvious winner. It’s the better film, with narrative nuance that Kells can’t muster. But The Secret of Kells is perhaps the best animated film of the year qua animation, the film whose virtues are most clearly tied to animation and the limitless possibilities therein. The American distributor plans to roll it out slowly over the next few months, beginning this weekend in New York and continuing the 19th in Boston. If you get a chance to see it in theaters, take it. It’s worth the effort.

Gemara: One can easily take the last scene of A Serious Man and abstract it across Coen Brothers film scripts as an explanatory device. Look at that in the distance: speeding car, maniac biker, scarlet wood chipper, nihilists, a slate gray twister, pick your narrative mechanic. The Coen’s G_d speaks from whirlwinds. To think about A Serious Man as a point in the same trajectory as a film like Raising Arizona is exhilarating. Sure they have had several missteps along the way, but if you just ignore those, what you can see in Larry’s plight is a distillation of all the loves, losses, and twists of fate that serve as the cogs and gears in the Coens’ very consistent imagination. A Serious Man confirms in a very detailed way that Burn After Reading, Barton Fink, or The Man Who Wasn’t There – take your pick of their films that struck you as profound and slight at the same time – are indeed helpful reflections on the tension in life between what is certain and uncertain. Similarly, Jewish theology is often communicated in ways that at first seem slight, tangential, or even totally irrelevant. Tucked away behind gentile teeth. But then it circles back on the soul somehow. Doesn’t that sound like their cinema?

The amount of biblical reference sown into the fabric of A Serious Man is off the charts. In one thread, Larry Gropnik channels David in his first encounter with Bathsheba, bathing in the distance. Beneath the hum of his TV antenna, he is immediately seduced by her tune in, turn on, drop out counter-cultural allure. She lies there just beyond the border of the covenant. David famously responded to the tragedy of his affair with Bathsheba with Psalm 51, a remarkable meditation on the inevitable grief of sin. In contrast, Larry’s far less noble theological fate becomes the point on which much Coen Brothers storytelling anxiously pivots.

The film is a similarly equivocating midrash on Job and his three increasingly irritating counselors. Job is a helpful narrative reference to Larry because he is such a classic example of thinking about God, life, and the problem of evil through the lens of Jewish monotheism. The film also plots Larry’s struggle through the three Job-like interlocutors, that is reminiscent of the way Talmud and midrash often make opposing claims that are only later resolved in oblique twists of narrative. But most comparisons stop here. There is a bit of theodicy in A Serious Man, but the film doesn’t seem as interested in whether God is just or not as it is in how religious language relates to the certainty/uncertainty paradigm in things like physics. This makes the end even more dramatic, in that the Coen Brothers don’t provide much theological context for the seemingly prophetic appearance of the twister and the doctor’s phone call. It is easier to recognize these things as hierophanies if you are familiar with the texture of similar biblical images, but otherwise the twister hits the film like something Wholly Other. It enters the script like a bit of hefty religious language that we can’t interpret as if to say: This is what we talk about when we talk about religion.

These days it is common to hear wonder batted about as a principle virtue. The Coen Brothers quickly deflate this balloon (or the American Beauty floating plastic bag) in the First Rabbi conversation. Despite this young rabbi’s advice, Larry already knows that wonder doesn’t always cut it, and then the film goes on to systematically deconstruct the typical middle-aged crisis man film. Larry’s dream sequence with his Bathsheba makes American Beauty look positively lurid, vacuous, not even worth tossing in the ring as a legitimate paean to existential crisis. He wakes up and sheds the Lester Burnham navel-gazing like it the artificial moral residue of a naughty dream.

Wonder isn’t enough, bits of pithy information that expand our horizons aren’t enough. Hashem is not simply a point of perspective that we can turn on and off like the pot dealer kid’s video camera. Hashem doesn’t pan and scan life for us. When Sy is referred to as “a serious man,” he becomes an example of how shallow the first Rabbi’s advice is. In contrast Larry sees a correspondence between the uncertainty inherent to physics and the uncertainty inherent to understanding what God is actually asking us to do in life. He may be thought of as “not as serious” as Sy because he isn’t content with pretending that being and acting a certain way will satisfy his existential conundrum. He doesn’t need the plastic bag/parking lot perspective change, which amounts to a psychological bait and switch. He needs to find an access point to his own tradition, a way to embed himself in the narrative world produced by this theological legacy. It may not actually provide the answers he is looking for, but it will provide boundaries within which he can act morally and confidently until the dimmer switches start to dial up.

And when all these biblical references begin to really gain traction, A Serious Man reveals itself as a seamlessly theological film. Its exploration of the intensely Judeo-Christian desire to understand doing the right thing as a solution to the problem of determinism vs. free will, or sovereignty vs. chance, or the Coen gloss of certainty vs. uncertainty (which really is a more Talmudic way of posing the problem) is unparalleled. It seems that the Coen brothers aren’t just using religion as a narrative mechanic that produces interesting coincidences, but as a set of patterns (Job, David, etc…) that enable us to connect with someone else’s personal crisis at a fundamental level. This is essentially how religious traditions function in American civil religious discourse. They are heuristic devices that can become intense modes of interpersonal reflection. Michael Chabon’s recent book about the Yiddish detective in Alaska comes to mind as a comparable example.

If the central question of this film rotates on Schroedinger’s cat, the religious implication is this: If the tradition is the box, is God alive or is he dead? The answer being that we really can’t know. If the tradition is the box, then there is a sense in which both answers are correct. I suppose this matches the Coen Brother’s personal take on religion well, as A Serious Man becomes a great example of a classical modern description of religious language. It is both meaningful and meaningless at the same time. But they have been constructing this thought throughout the film in various ways, skillfully exemplified in the stoned kid’s reading of Torah, all the way until the end, at which point we seem to witness a hierophany of a prophetic sort and direct punitive judgment at the same time. Perfect Coen twist. (Is religious language meaningful? Is it? Really? Then comes a massive blast of effective religious language.)

Larry agonizes through this rich vein of Jewish self-reflection. But it is only when he alights upon a mediating position about the whole religion issue that allows him to accept a bribe every now and then that the total possible reality of this religious language/tradition rears its ugly head. We don’t need to know whether or not God is behind the whirlwind and the phone call. It is enough to know that Larry will never be able to have certainty about God’s presence in either, and is thus thrust into an even more serious existential crisis than the one that he began the film with. It is now not a matter of the question of: What should I do?, but: Why is this happening to me?

Religion is a balance of existential crises. A Serious Man seems to suggest that we are at least able to choose which crisis we are willing to live with.

It seems borderline crazy that it’s taken this long and has been so hard to get decent releases of much of the filmography of one of the key figures in film history.  In a certain sense, though, maybe that’s apropos.  Roberto Rossellini is one of the most elusive, unlikely, maddening, flighty, brilliant, persistent characters to repeatedly shatter and remake cinema.  His career was a roller-coaster ride of acclaim and derision.  Through it all, he scratched out one of the richest veins of film history, one that is still producing all these years later, drawn upon by generations of filmmakers worldwide.  Not bad for an incurable playboy-artist who drove crazy his actors, crew, funders, audiences and critics, pooh-poohing his own personal myth even as he wove it.  The War Trilogy was snatched out of the fires of World War II, and Rossellini began even before the fire was out with an unexpected critical and box-office hit from occupied Rome.  In the process, he created a new film style and rehabilitated Italy’s image in world opinion.  Then he wheeled around and invested that capital in ways that turned the world against him, sparked notorious scandals, got himself exiled from polite company, only to end up canonized by one cinematic New Wave after another.  No wonder so many people have had such a hard time keeping up.

Me, I just got used to things like long stretches of dialogue untranslated into subtitles on my ancient, crappy VHS copies of his films.  But not only is the translation and subtitle problem remedied in this new Criterion set, but the image and sound — while it isn’t quite “slick” — is better than we have a right to expect from that earthy ideal,  neorealism.  And there it is, showing up right on time, “a term that ranks with noir as one of the most contested in film history,” says James Quant in the introductory essay that opens the 45-page booklet from this box-set.  “Neorealism” — nobody was more surprised than Rossellini at his invention, and then subsequent betrayal of  this protean absolute.  Might as well add my own definition: neorealism, rather than a means of telling a story, is a way of letting the story tell itself.  In other words, the materials of the film — the location, the actors, the things – all have their own message that deserves to be heard; a neorealist artist has a special capacity to receive and not just impose meaning.  Or, to let Rossellini try his hand at it: “Neorealism consists in following a person with love.”

If Rossellini was the father, necessity was the mother of this invention. The Italian film industry was in shambles. Rome’s Cinecittà studio was a refugee camp.  Filmmakers, screenwriters, producers, actors, and crew people were as defeated as the rest of  their nation.  Yet Rossellini, who’d been making films under the Fascists, determined to make one now that he was free of them.  The production of Rome, Open City is the stuff of legend: the begging, borrowing and stealing film stock and power from the occupiers; the corralling of money, cast and crew — the continuing of the Resistance by other means.  Principle photography began before the dust settled on German convoys departing the capital, long before the Nazis surrendered their control of he rest of the country.  To make a film on the very recent past, with actual participants, in actual locations, under extreme conditions, created a new filmmaking method: in its ideal form, neorealism came to mean shooting on location, with natural light, with amateur actors, improvising small stories, from the “here and now,” and energized by a stark moral urgency.

Of course, Rome, Open City does not give us neorealism in its ideal form.   This is a conventional film in many ways — so much so, that Rossellini came to hate it, the sentimentality and stock villains.  It had too much of “the old ingredients.”  He hated it for another reason, too: audiences, if they could, would have forced him to remake it again and again for the rest of his career — and they never forgave him when he refused.  It’s easy to understand both the audience here and the director.  Note this isn’t a perfect film, but — the radical circumstances of its production aside — it’s still a great film.  Open City is so full of tenderness and humanity in that Catholic Fordian way, with a casual earthiness Ford would never be able to achieve in the Hollywood system.  The plot follows (”with love”) the crossing paths of a diverse Italian resistance against Nazi occupation: Communists, priests, ordinary folks find an almost utopian community in the fight against evil.  Making any kind of film work is a miracle, and if there are such things as miracles, there’s probably not much difference between a big one and little one: nevertheless, Open City seems an especially big miracle — imagine a film masterpiece emerging today from the streets of Baghdad or Kabul — or even Port Au Prince.

You’d think any filmmaker who can make this kind of film under these kinds of conditions should be allowed to make whatever  kind of film he or she wants to make after that.   Instead, Rossellini was pilloried for his every move — for violating convention, for violating the new conventions of neorealism.  He was haunted by  Open City for the rest of his life; yet, unlike many a filmmaker in that position may have done, he refused to turn success into a franchise.  Instead, he let the voices within and without chase him out of his own box — and produced a succession of important works unrivaled in film history.  At times it seemed like only Andre Bazin, the pioneer French film critic and most articulate patron of neorealism, understood what Rossellini was doing and defended him the whole way.  (Of course, there was also Ingrid Bergman, who after seeing Open City and the follow-up, Paisà, was ready to throw away her Hollywood career in order to work with Rossellini — but that’s another story.)

Until this Criterion release, I’d only seen the American cut of Paisà (and barely that, given the image quality.)  The new DVD is crystal clear in comparison, if still gritty.  Paisà is an anthology film: a half dozen short stories, some better than others, following the American army from landing in Sicily up the boot of Italy.  Along the way, they encounter the enemy and the locals, which often threaten to be one and the same.  The theme is cross-cultural communication: everybody is always misinterpreting somebody else, trying or failing to speak or understand another language.  They stare across a great divide until (as somebody has said) a spark jumps the divide and (as Peter Brunette says) “their humanity is revealed to one another and they can no longer treat each other as objects.”  From the initial, abortive attempts of Sicilian girl Carmela and “Joe from Jersey” to the total identification by the Americans with the Partisan cause in the north, we see the connections increase as the story and journey continue and leave us with hope in the midst of tragedy.

Language problems here may include a more neorealist vocabulary: unconventional structure, production values and performances.  The stiff American G.I.s in the “Sicily” episode might scare some viewers away; the “Naples” episode is better — a confrontation with American racism in a story of a black soldier and a street urchin.  The director relates, in an interview included here, how he cadged from the occupiers vehicles and both American and German soldiers — the latter POWs, of course.  They drove around Italy (Rossellini claims he drove the tank), working as cast and crew.  At one point the POWs, worried about losing their  guard, wandered into a monastery and gave themselves up to the monks. This became the setting for the “Romagna” episode (even if it was filmed in Sicily), where the cloistered monks meet a trio of American army chaplains — men of war facing men of peace, yes, but even worse, one of them is a Protestant and another a Jew!  “Paisà” is a name for someone from one’s own village: this is a film about the possibility of moving from uninvolved outsider to sympathetic insider.

The most daring such movement in the War Trilogy  involves seeing through the eyes of the enemy in Germany, Year Zero.   The audacity of making a film amid the ruins of the Third Reich — while they were practically still smoldering!  In shattered Berlin, the survivors are forced together in any place still marginally intact.  Edmund is a boy trying to be a man in a world where adults are swindlers, hookers, predators — everybody is selling something; openness, innocence, purity seem liabilities if you want to survive.  Yet Edmund seems to embody these virtues — even more than I’d realized.  Until this release, I’d only seen the Italian-dubbed version of this film.  Yet the dubbing actor was much older than the child on the screen — his voice had already changed!  Hearing Edmund’s real voice transforms the experience, elevates the character even more as a tragic figure.  (The Italian version also sports a clunky prologue, here thankfully absent.)  The polarities could not be more stark: a sweet little child wandering among the Nazi ruins.

When a former teacher continues to inculcate Edmund with the Nazi Gospel of strength, the boy takes the lessons to heart.  And some broken things just can’t be fixed.  To heal his nation, Edmund has to find a way to start over. “He’s the sacrificial lamb in a certain sense,” says film scholar Adriano Aprà.  Indeed, Edmund is Isaac, and this film offers a shocking — and ultimately redemptive –  image of the Kierkegaardian leap.  In one of two interviews included in the set, Aprà muses on how the death of the director’s son Romano overlaid Rossellini’s grappling with Europe’s tragedy in this film, infusing it with a very personal processing of grief and loss.  “It’s only if we journey into the depths of hell – that is, accept the hell within us – that we can hope to re-emerge on the other side and build a better future.”  Aprà joins a growing critical consensus that Germany, Year Zero is Rossellini’s masterpiece.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

After breaking things down in his War Trilogy,  Rossellini ascended again, reaching forward and behind, to the roots of European virtue — even as he, personally, was caught up in an explosive moral scandal.  He drew upon some hidden source to press on, pouring himself into films that were, at the time, spurned as failures — several of which have come to be numbered among most influential masterpieces of cinema. He later reconciled with the public and moved on to a new frontier, a series of historical films for television, in which he continued to plumb for foundations of Italian and Western civilization.  Last year, Criterion brought out a box set of “Rossellini’s History Films-Renaissance and Enlightenment,” including Blaise Pascal (1972), The Age of the Medici (1973) and Cartesius (1974).  These go with other Criterion editions of Generale della Rovere (1959) and The Flowers of St. Francis (1950).  Based on the superb image quality of some of the clips used in special features on the “War Trilogy” set, I’ll take a wild guess that other films now being readied for release include Socrates (1971), Augustine of Hippo (1972), and — more importantly — L’Amore (1948, an anthology film, with “Una Voce Humana” and one of my favorites, “Il Miracolo”) along with Stromboli (1950) and Europa ‘51 (1952).  If only!

Meanwhile, there are Special Features aplenty to keep ourselves occupied with this latest Criterion set.

* There are introductions by the director himself from the 1963 French TV series, Roberto Rossellini Presents — though he tends to deliver spoilers, and (like most artists) isn’t always the best interpreter of either his own work or others’ discussion of it.

* Roberto Rossellini is a solid biographical and career survey, by Italian filmmaker Carlo Lizzani, a former Rossellini AD, featuring archival footage, clips and interviews — with daughter Isabella Rossellini; lifelong student Martin Scorsese; François Truffaut as representative for a French Wave that owed so much to Rossellini; collaborators Sergio Amidei and Federico Fellini (who directed his first shot in Paisà); Alfonsino Pasca, who was and played a Neapolitan urchin; finally there’s Rossellini himself, at various conferences, eluding the academics who try to chase him into some rigid category.

*The faded clips in Once Upon a Time… Rome, Open City show the huge leap in quality in the new transfer of the film.  In this 2006 “making of” documentary, Rossellini shares personal reminiscences of the Allied liberation of Rome, and what it was like pulling together a film project in the midst and aftermath of that.  We hear again from Fellini and Carlo Lizzani, and also an unexpected guide, Vittorio Mussolini, cinephile and would-be filmmaker who oversaw Rossellini’s early work.

* Easily the best supplement is Into the Future, a 30-minute visual essay, compiled and narrated by Rossellini scholar, Tag Gallagher (whose The Adventures Of Roberto Rossellini: His Life And Films is the definitive biographical analysis.)  Gallagher cuts together stills and clips under a learned and often poetic rumination, with an eagle eye for details and surgical-strike insights.   (”The GI seems unaware that the rubble he sits on is due to three years of Allied bombing, killing 20,000 civilians and Pasquale’s parents…”)  This essay engages the War Trilogy, in both myth and fact, with loving care.

* There’s more: Italian filmmakers the Taviani brothers, whose WWII drama The Night of the Shooting Stars (1982) offers quirky homage to Paisà, discuss Rossellini’s influence on their own films — but, alas, we don’t hear on that topic from the Dardennes brothers, who have named Germany, Year Zero as their “model film.” German film scholar Thomas Meder offers an illustrated essay to argue that Rossellini’s relationship with his German mistress Roswitha Smith played a role in his sympathetic treatment of the defeated enemy.  In Letters from the Front, Carlo Lizzani talks about the challenges of working with Rossellini, reading letters written from the set to an art critic friend.  For all this, only one of the films comes with a commentary: Rome, Open City, done by Peter Bondanella, author of Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present.

* Finally, a 45-page booklet, featuring an introductory essay by James Quant of the Toronto Cinemathèque on the complexities of “neorealism” — with a nod to recent conversation of an emerging “neo-neo realism“.  Each film in the War Trilogy also gets a brief introduction by a different film critic: Irene Bignardi calls neorealism “an opening onto reality;” Colin McCabe offers further pondering and parsing of this ticklish term, “reality:’ Jonathan Rosenbaum insists on the ethical, even spiritual, thrust of the films.

The War Trilogy summons moral seriousness and grand expectations: Rome, Open City was, as the directors of one documentary in this set declare, “the rallying myth for a new Italy.”  Tag Gallagher calls Paisà “the founding epic of the New Italy, like The Aeneid was for the Roman Empire.”  For me, it’s impossible to consider the War Trilogy in isolation from the director’s subsequent films; in fact, I’ve long included several of Rossellini’s war and postwar projects as part of a larger unified work — call it The Love & War Cycle.  This series continues from Year Zero directly into another film — though not the next one in the director’s filmography — which offers a thematic rejoinder to the end of childhood: its rebirth.  The Flowers of St. Francis begins a conversation about love that carries into Europa ‘51 with its modern-day Francis, confronts postwar cynicism with fresh spiritual reality in Stromboli, and climaxes in Voyage to Italy.  Adding The Miracle somewhere in there, this cycle offers as profound a spiritual and aesthetic journey as an epic Medieval fresco, and with The War Trilogy spans heaven and hell.

Rossellini’s films form an ambitious and prophetic call for a New Europe not seen again until Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski, following the end of the Cold War, unleashes his furious energies on his own European re-founding myth, the Three Colors triptych.  The first film of that series, Blue, involves the creation of a symphony to commemorate the unity of Europe.  The piece is a setting of St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians: “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”  Roberto Rossellini’s neorealist postwar journey follows the same thematic quest and reaches the same conclusion.  The War Trilogy is the first movement, driving fearlessly into the hole in the Western soul, with a view to the light at the end of the tunnel.