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Innocence
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Great or Nothing
The
Australian arthouse legend Paul Cox moved into the feature format with Kostas (1979), bringing with him the
traits he had developed over the prior 15 years in short, experimental
filmmaking and art photography: a striking use of lyrical and symbolic imagery,
often shot on Super-8; a thick sense of mood; a concentration on human
intimacies set within the social contexts of contemporary Australia; and themes
of alienation, exile, hope.
Cox
reached a career highpoint, at least from the vantage point of public
recognition and acclaim, at the turn of the century with Innocence. Like a previous success of his, A Woman's Tale (1991), Innocence deals with the passion and pain experienced by the elderly – a subject always
deemed unfashionable by the standards of the commercial film industry.
Yet
opinion tends to split right down the middle on the true value of Cox’s films:
for every occasion that a national artistic figure of the status of novelist
Thomas Keneally (Schindler’s Ark)
compares Cox to national icon Patrick White and declares him “a bit of a genius
and something of an Elijah”, (1) there is a grumbling counter-reaction keen to
caricature the director as the epitome of everything that is dubious in the
old-fashioned, middle-class notion of art cinema.
Since
the start of his feature career, Cox has fulfilled a nostalgia among older
patrons of art cinema – as a throwback to the grand Fellini-Bergman-Truffaut
era of yesteryear – as well as providing a handy target for a younger
generation eager to jump onto an anti-art-cinema backlash wagon.
Sympathetic
viewers and reviewers (including David Stratton) (2) have long felt moved to
defend Cox as a film artist, an auteur, someone with his own, unique voice –
very European and mostly High Art in his obsessions, references and
temperament, tending towards a serene spirituality in tune with the growing New
Age mood. Regarded as the noble exception to the norm of mainstream film and TV
in Australia, Cox is (in Brian McFarlane’s assessment) “prepared to be
ambitious, to risk charges of floridness and pretension”. (3)
Among
the dissenters, the Cinema Papers review by Richard Brown of Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent Van Gogh (1987) wryly summed up the case for the prosecution: “It … comes as no surprise
that Paul Cox should choose to make a documentary on this artist, given Cox’s
apparent reverence for (artistic) suffering and high-art values … It’s the old
cliché that to be truly creative (and ultimately to possess ‘genius’) one must
go beyond the tolerances of bourgeois society to the very limits of existence.
Only in this way can one’s art be ‘authentic’”. (4) Here, the droll citation of
once reverential words and concepts (artistry, creativity, genius, existential
authenticity) sums up the skepticism, common among cinephiles by the late
1980s, about Cox’s status as a local art cinema icon.
Has
Cox’s cinema changed, evolved, deepened since Kostas in 1979? Innocence is, in so many ways, exactly the film that Cox has always made. In one sense,
this is an admirable sign of consistency – just the sort of signature we demand
from auteurs. But a signature can be a prison, if it leads to stasis. Positif editor Michel Ciment once
rightly exclaimed in admiration of the greats: “What a complex path leads from I Vitelloni (1953) to Intervista (1987) for Fellini, from Los Olvidados (1950) to That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) for
Buñuel, from Citizen Kane (1941) to The Immortal Story (1968) for Welles,
from Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) to Fanny and Alexander (1982) for Bergman!” (5)
There
is no comparable evolution evident in Cox’s handling of his pet themes, such as
the spiritually redemptive power of love (Innocence ends with the bald exhortation to “Love the world!”), versus the soulless,
alienated materialism of contemporary society. There is one intriguing,
paradoxical complication that Cox has introduced into this standard scenario,
in films including Golden Braid (1991) and Man of Flowers (1983): his
characters tend to have a particularly troubled relation to art (especially the
high art of painting and classical music).
Such
art inspires with its transcendent air, its aura of the highest human
achievement; but it can also become a morbid, solitary obsession, blocking the
journey back to life, the natural world (always prominently and solemnly
featured in his films) and other people. As themes per se, these are perfectly
valid, indeed fertile preoccupations; Lars von Trier (Breaking the Waves, 1996) and
Takeshi Kitano (Hana-Bi,
1998) have done wonders with them. But Cox’s films, from one to the next, catch
themselves in a facile loop: they all start with vague malaise, churn through a
dark night of the soul, and end in a spurious redemption.
Even
more grievously, to my eyes and ears, Cox’s craft as a filmmaker has not grown
much over the past two decades. What seemed striking and personal in his first
features can now seem tired and calculated, a species of cliché – especially
those grainy, step-printed, Super-8 flashes of birds, streams and naked bodies.
More crucially, a comparison with contemporary classicists such as Bertrand
Tavernier (A Sunday in the Country,
1984) reveals a fundamental lack of real aesthetic control on Cox’s part. I remain
unconvinced by assertions of Cox’s “formal subtlety”, “restrained ingenuity” or
“inspired craftsmanship”. (6) To me, his films have a sometimes shocking air of
amateurishness and off-handedness – as if near enough a particular effect, mood
or meaning is always good enough.
The
sombre elements (visions, outbursts, tears, declarations) rub uneasily against
the daggy, funny touches (supplied by local writers of dubious renown including
Bob Ellis, John Clarke and Barry Dickens). The long dialogue scenes are often
inert, unimaginatively staged and framed: Cox may have given up his penchant
for the meandering pan-and-zoom shots that once pulverised Man of Flowers, but now he seems to have settled into the evenly
lit, stodgily centred, glacial mode of mise
en scène announced in Lust and Revenge (1996). His films betray a tin
ear for the properly cinematic soundtrack: unsubtle noisescapes (like the
thundering clocks in Golden Braid)
alternate with reams of quoted and composed music. As for the acting in these
films, it is no fault of the performers (Charles Tingwell, Julia Blake and
Terry Norris take the principal roles here) that they must struggle with such
unutterably miserable, clunky dialogue (from Innocence: “We shared a lot of lust”) and the sorry lack of any
ensemble effect blending the entire cast.
All
those who, since the 1950s, have set the tone for classic “art cinema” (a
designation I dislike) find particular, indelible, often slyly subversive ways
of matching the personal substance of their visions to the more conventional
demands of storytelling. Cox has not yet managed to reach such a level of
ingenuity. Innocence displays the
self-same clumsiness with respect to establishing a coherent fictional world,
laying out the terms of a plotline or creating psychologically plausible
characters that his films displayed 20 years ago.
The
fact that Cox can keep treading water in his work – and that he keeps getting
congratulated for it, as a gifted, singular innocent – says a lot about the
still embryonic state that art cinema has reached in Australia. (7)
Ultimately,
I believe there is a more fruitful way to consider Cox: not as a master, but –
alongside his closest cousin, Rolf de Heer (The
Old Man Who Read Love Stories, 2000) – an exponent of naive cinema, akin to the genre of naive art. (Curiously, the
director’s path has crossed with that of a truly inspired but far more ironic
innocent, Guy Maddin – Cox is among the cast of Careful [1992].)
In
this mode, one can appreciate better, even enjoy, the excessive, declaratory,
over-reaching, earnestly sentimental thrust of Cox’s films. Innocence is, in the final analysis, a
naive message picture peopled with characters who mouth supposedly wise and
wonderful things about life, love and ageing. As Robin Wood once said of
Kubrick’s 2001:
A Space Odyssey (1968): “The film’s ambition challenges one to see
it as a great work or as nothing; for me, the choice is easy”. (8)
MORE Cox: Cactus, The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky, Human Touch, The Nun and the Bandit
© Adrian Martin July 2001 |
