Film/ The Man of My Life

"The Man of My Life", directed by Zabou Breitman September 2007


Imagine a rainy-day summer camp project where the youthful avatars of Eric Rohmer and Andrei Tarkovsky unite to create a cinematic divertissement with the theme, perhaps drawn out of a hat: The Universe- amusingly, also the name of the coffee bar at the local town square. Like the universe, or, more terrestrially, the late summer in which the film takes place, there is too much of everything in Zabou Breitman's new film, "The Man of My Life", co-written by Ms. Breitman with Agnes de Sacy (in French with English subtitles).

I can't help wondering how many horoscope saturated bloggers might be at this moment hashing out the exact trines and conjuncts in this over-bursting cosmos of an unabashedly romantic movie, a fable imbued with the sensibility and truth of children's stories. It is also chock-a-block with the endless detailing and imaginative coloring that is a specialty of stories by children. It is engaging and fun to follow each piece of the complex mosaic as it inscribes yet another dimension or reference into an already crowded tale, but this may have come at too high a price. One is reminded of the advice to the novice traveller: put your clothes and your money on the bed, then take away half the clothes and double the money; now you're ready to go. Half as much story and cleverness could have allowed for a greater emotional depth.

Set in a picture-perfect maison de vacance in the south of France, this little galaxy constellates in its pre-Copernican symmetry around Frederic, its beneficently rounded, loving and earthy center. Bernard Campan's Frederic is like a luminous, small Dutch still life of a ripe peach in a blue and white china bowl- the sheer joy of its simple deliberateness even the most die-hard downtown conceptualist could not resist. Lea Drucker is his beautiful lunar wife, Frederique, who has yet to find out the extent to which she is dependent upon predictability. Their three children are a tender, if calculated, array: the quiet, older saturnine daughter spends her vacation peering into a microscope; the middle son is a would-be magician in a skeleton printed T shirt, his sleight-of-hand changes the king of spades into the king of hearts; the youngest, Arthur, is the irrepressible and irresistible masked and caped trickster, constantly in motion, searching and heroic. Various family and friends fill out the night sky and daytime activities that shuffle along seemingly eternally.

But the happy couple is just past the cusp of youth and opposition appears like a small disproportionately influential asteroid in the form of Charles Berling's Hugo, the new, single, gay next-door neighbor. Hugo's sphere is icy mentation and azure imagination, constricted and un-forgiving, fearless and honest; he, too, is at an edge only slightly different from Frederic's.

Myriad flashbacks and surreal imagery weave their way into the domestic drama, as Frederic and Hugo become not so much friends, as neighboring influences- this is not a male bonding film. It goes without saying that if you are expecting to see the cinema verite aftermath of a Larchmont barbecue you are looking in the wrong place for the wrong thing. The flashbacks mostly revolve around a long after dinner conversation a deux as they congenially battle out opposing views about love and life, stretching only slightly, for now, out of their respective caricatures.

As early morning air chills, Frederic has fetched sweaters for them both. The mental Hugo happily parries and thrusts in his erotically charged polemic against relationships. Like anyone who has paid a high price, he overvalues the narrow purchase he has on Eros; Frederic, by contrast, is so awash in Eros that it barely registers with him. In his bourgeois mechanical materiality, he is transfixed by the label sticking up from the back of the sweater that Hugo has just put on and, while carrying on the conversation- including a brief rendition of the 1930's cabaret song, Parlez de Moi, backlit with the golden rays of early morning- devises and executes a complex design both proper and inconspicuous to tuck the offending label back out of sight.

Frederic's unconscious flow of warmth and good nature has been diverted by the force of this newcomer, now running partner, and Frederique will suffer for it. The story turns retrograde with harsh doses of reality: limitation, infidelity, deceit, cruelty and AIDS. Hugo's mentioned but unseen daughter arrives on the scene. A beauteous treat that did not fall far from the tree, she is full of felt and clever accusation, and one previously unknown bit of information, trying to convince her father to visit, if not forgive, his own harsh, rejecting and rejected father who now lies, in hospital, dying.

Everything is set; all that can is madly breaking away from it's former form. Frederique howls into the night, the conventional container of their relationship can no longer be taken for granted, she is a powerless new moon, a sunken cave of darkness. Frederic, wounded by a simple sprained ankle, is no longer the center. Something has pulled him away and into a consciousness of a greater Sun-center, his world has expanded, but he must find his place within these new dimensions.

To fulfill this destiny he hobbles off into the night to find Hugo, messenger of the gift, if not its source, to give him the reciprocal token: a tender acknowledgement to a man all too accustomed to so much less. Hugo's still rampant harshness is overwhelmed by Frederic's simple generosity and he, too, is released from a predictable repetition. As stated earlier in the movie: magic is what happens when you're not looking, from the place you don't expect. It looks like chance to the viewer, but it is hard work to the creator of the illusion. And what about the stars? For millennia man has looked to the heavens trying to discern the clues to fulfill his fate and outwit chance.

There are few actually false notes in this film but the director did not do the substance of her story any service by having Hugo default into conventional sentimentality when his daughter demands to know why he loves her? His replies, she grippingly points out, are all matters of chance. Instead of agreeing with her, like it or not, he dissolves into hugs and confirmations that, yes, he loves her simply because she is his daughter. No doubt this reasoning makes good and possibly necessary box-office concessions, but isn't the rare beauty and terror of love, like grace, its pure freedom from reason and contingency?

Film/ 3:10 to Yuma

3:10 to Yuma directed by James Mangold September 2007


As the murderous outlaw, Ben Wade, in James Mangold's masterful remake of "3:10 to Yuma", Russell Crowe purrs his way through a performance so juicy it best reminds one of Lawrence Olivier's off-hand admonition that a great actor must make everyone in the theater want to have sex with him. Christian Bale shows just how spectacularly "little" the little man can be and Peter Fonda is perfection as a virtual personification of the cantankerous and contradictory Wild West.

Hollywood westerns simply are the acknowledged representation of American mythology in all its idealogical promiscuity, opportunism and self-forgiveness. Like the proverbial Melting Pot, these films can accommodate whatever is thrown into them by way of character, theme, circumstance or action, historical or current, fact or fiction.

We have a one-legged veteran of "friendly Civil War fire", mortally harassed by a greedy mortgage lender; the velvety free-spirited thief who is rigorously honest, quotes the Bible, sketches wildlife en pleine aire, and blows up whole trainloads of prospectors; a company-man who sees no wrong in keeping the corporation out of the red, as it were, by literally killing the competition, in this case the indigenous men, women and children who want to live on their own land and are willing to fight for it.

Beautiful Womanhood gets token mention in the cameo roles of the good blond and the bad brunette, united in unanimous endorsement of the vital power and ineffable attraction of evil. The inescapable thrust of the railway, Trojan Horse technology in its 19th century mechanistic avatar; the plight of cheap-labor immigrants; a town that will murder itself for the mere promise of $200.00 and reversals of allegiance and sympathy that ricochet between all the characters draws a seemingly unmistakable connect-the-dot portrait of ourselves.

Mangold goes one thrilling step further lest we think we can wake up the morning after and say it aint so. In the opening scene of the movie Bale's older son is awakened by the wheezing sound of his sickly younger brother. Darkness is shattered by the striking of a match, and we glimpse his bedside reading, Tales of Outlaws of the West. Can we mistake that what we are about to see is already the past?

The boy upholds the long tradition of disobeying the father's command, following the hirelings escorting the captured thief, arriving just in time to save their lives. Despite resourcefulness and spirit the next time he does not succeed and, before his eyes, his father's body is pummeled with bullets. Now everyone else is dead. The boy's gun is trained on the Outlaw; he has only to pull the trigger to claim the future and truly step onto the ambiguous ground that is adulthood. But the trigger is not pulled.

The gun is thrust away and the boy drops to his dying father, whispering last-minute lies of congratulation for an impossible job not actually achieved: placing the prisoner on the 3:10 train to Yuma, for him to be tried and executed. The Outlaw can only deliver himself into the custody of the law, ruing, perhaps, how temporary the inconvenience will be, given the power of money. He knows he has already outlived his era. He whistles to his horse to follow the chugging train, a gesture so quaint it can only bring on a smile.

Art/ Scott Grodesky

Scott Grodesky
Baumgartner Gallery NYC May 2007


Looking at the mostly large-scale paintings on canvas by Scott Grodesky at Baumgartner Gallery in Chelsea I am reminded of the charm, colorations and narrative power of Florentine school painting of the 14th century. Not that Mr. Grodesky's subject matter refers to anything but the immediate here and now: "Earthquake" (2006) and "Redevelopment" (2007) are parables of compromised life in New York City Now. Furthermore the paintings express the kind of serious anxiety about the future that the Florentine paintings, in their time, were meant to allay by showing the saint-in-action.

An overall quietness is achieved by the painting technique itself. All of the works are of thinly washed acrylic colors that stay for the most part within their penciled outlines and appear to have had their materiality almost literally, but certainly figuratively, blotted out. There is no real painterliness in a modern sense; the physical surface is flat and feels especially dry, fragile. Each work employs multiple perspectives, scale that seems, most often, to indicate importance and repetition of subject within the same image to give an idea of duration and futurity.

"Red Chair" (2005) would seem to be the least apocalyptic of the larger works. In it a mother and child are pictured twice in ascending scale as if rotating clockwise. In front, at the bottom of the picture plane, we are looking up into the mother's undescribed, shadowed face; she is looking down, but not, as it turns out, at the child. The child is looking over the mother's shoulder, perhaps at its own more defined face in the second, much larger depiction of these two figures that appears, as it were, behind them, but now seen from behind and above. In this instantiation the child is looking out, not exactly at us, and the mother is looking through a doorway that leads deeper into the picture, to the next room where we can see only the corner of a wildly over-scaled lapis blue table in an otherwise black outer-space background. To make this vision of the future even more ominous the blue table corner is rendered as airy negative space to the black defining slice of "background" visible through the doorway. The domestic scene is finished with a partly dark standing lamp; cluttered bookcase and loose pages hanging from the walls that more resemble IV drip bags. All the colors are somewhat pastel if nonetheless bright, the way thinned paint always allows more light to reflect off the white-primed surface, causing the colors to glow a little un-naturally, speak a little more strongly.

These are powerful works that are as insistent as their edges are clean. They speak to our many and often conflicting concerns about surviving physically, emotionally and spiritually in a world where our own interests often seem to contradict themselves.

Art/ Thomas Lyon Mills

Thomas Lyon Mills
10 1/2 Maps
Luise Ross Gallery NYC May 2007

The first impression upon entering into the principal room of the Luise Ross Gallery filled with the works on paper of Thomas Lyon Mills is of being enfolded into an exquisitely soft-textured and subtle-hued drapery of ancient Chinese landscape imagery. One is immediately aware of being in the presence of a rich and intelligent imaginative interpretation of the idea of "place". The real-life places from which Mr. Mills derives his inspiration are the enclosed wetlands and sky-free hills of the Adirondacks and the subterranean catacombs of Rome, earthy locations that impart a rustic "dug up", archaeological quality.

To say that these works are dream-like is true in many different ways: how the image vocabulary commingles (corridors sprout out of tree trunks as in "Convex Map", 2001-2006), or the way each work is cobbled together from several separate pages of different types and kinds of paper. As in a dream, where there is no such thing as a non-sequitur, the imagery transitions from one natural or architectural observation to another with a Piranesi-esque precision ambling over the different-sized pieced pages, suggesting a languorous but scrupulous idea of time: it is all-time, but also, exactly, this-time.

In "Val's Woodrick" (2000-2006) a cantilevered wooden shed is partially pictured in three different locations from three different positions, at different degrees of execution, again suggesting time and variety of recollection. It looks like a hermit-scholar's retreat from a Sung dynasty scroll, except that it is a humble dark brown cabin that one might recall from childhood, or last week. Areas of openness on the pages seem to speak not so much of either possibility or forgetting or erasure, as of the beginning of remembering anew, which could spring up anywhere and work its way seamlessly into the existing design.

All of these works resonate with the watery aspect of the medium and the idea of an endless pool of imagination and experience and the startling realization that each painting grew into its present state over an average period of five years. Images bob to the surface here and there and seem to leak over the pages, assemble and configure into meaning before they disperse, and continue the cycle. These works are like a mystic pool where imagery floats up from below as much as it reflects from above, caught for a moment on the intangible surface.

Mr. Mills refers to them as "maps" and, like a dream, or an ancient vase re-configured from multiple shards, they seem to be trying to tell us something about where we have come from, something about how to understand where we are, where we are going, and, of course, they are buried treasure come to light.

Art/ Glenn Brown

Glenn Brown
Gagosian Gallery Chelsea, NYC April 2007

Walking into the first of two rooms devoted to the paintings and sculptures of the English artist Glenn Brown, it is impossible, despite the appealing screech of the large neon-hued paintings, not to first align oneself to the lone sculpture, "The Sound of Music" (1995-2007). A skeleton of a bare, iconic table is wispily encrusted with scabs of multi-colored dried paint that appear to be trying to escape from the table surface and legs, rather than that these ragged paint layers were applied to the structure, as logic would say must be the case. Is the table sloughing off its unique and particular non-essentialness, ultimately revealing the rather elegant but ho-hum mid-century clean-lined ideal table form within? The plexiglass "cover" only adds to the feeling that the whole thing, table and paint- which are not entirely distinguishable as separate from each other- might up and away if not for the Cinderella casing.

The second room contains the other sculpture in the show, "Life is Empty and Meaningless" (2005). Similarly encased, it is a craggy oversize cubistic portrait bust with bowed head and, just possibly, little horns. Composed of tactile, 3-D strokes of paint on what uncannily feels like a hollow core, reds, blues and greens, on the figure's right side blend with creamy white, melting into coral, pistachio and sky blue; the coloration of the left side is dark, defaulting to deep purple. Again, it is hard to say if the paint is coming or going, obfuscating or revealing; certainly it is "doing" something. Both sculptures speak to the truth that it is the paint itself which is neither empty nor meaningless.

These works are key to the nine meticulously crafted paintings. The paintings all share the device of a trompe l'oeil effect that hilariously mimics the 3-D impasto of the sculptures, as if the images were fed into a Photoshop paintbrush tool, except not; they could also be tediously exact renderings of carnival-colored twisted rag dolls- in most cases the composition suggests larger than life portraiture. The end result is a precision of execution that becomes meditative, like following the line in a Celtic knotted border. The image is flat and unpainterly; there is no attempt to seduce kinesthetically with the paint surface- in fact, these paintings barely register as objects, despite their insistent visual presence. They are as impossible to "enter" as they are to ignore.

Many of the works have source references from Fragonard and other non-copy-righted artists of the past. Additional human or creature body parts seem to be emerging from or receding back into the central shapes, but the most powerful works are more ambiguous. "Alabama Song" (2007), perhaps the strongest painting in the show, could be an image of a chicken or rooster- amusingly humble, or, the source of life and its first dilemma: chicken or egg? Is it being torn in half, or cloning itself, or, are two birds mating or fighting to death, with featherlike squiggles flying off into the slightly atmospheric coral background or racing toward them, building blocks of future generations? Is it the violence of creation or destruction? It states its presence as emphatically as it denies identification.