Ferrari

(Michael Mann, USA/Italy, 2023)

Toward a Description

The Kingdom of Appearances
The opening scene of Ferrari is a cliché: a historic montage that provides a recap on Enzo Ferrari’s successful career as a racing car driver during the 1920s. In grainy black-and-white (of course), pumped up with period music and sound effects. There’s something cartoonish about it; a cartoon prologue, like a quotation, a bit of stock reportage dialed in from elsewhere. It’s not only cliché, but looks, evidently, fake: as expected or even demanded by the logic of the Hollywood biopic, Adam Driver as Ferrari is digitally interpolated into the footage, looking a little like Daffy Duck in goggles. But there is an abrupt cut wielded on both the image and sound of this sequence, as if the film is declaring: no more, basta!

There will not be another sequence like this in Ferrari. It’s there to indicate what the film will not be, how it will not proceed. The presence of such a cliché belongs to the kingdom of appearances, conventions, genres, surfaces, grubby presuppositions held by undemanding viewers.

Cinema exists, at its height, to divert us from such a regime of appearance. It exists to surprise us, to reveal something that is, precisely, under or beyond the surface, not immediately readable or comprehensible. Cinema, which depends so fundamentally on the appearance of things, must take us beyond appearance, beyond our instant processing of familiar appearances: this is the greatest challenge for any filmmaker.

Michael Mann, in his own way, makes this point constantly in his promotion of Ferrari: the look of things must be as accurate as possible (and he is famous for ensuring this level of verisimilitude), but the profound truth of any scene, any action, is inside the character, a psychological matter. And yet the psyche per se cannot be seen or shown: it can only be revealed through the interplay of outward appearances, through a dynamic of signs. The kingdom of appearance is thus a richly paradoxical resource in cinema – a furious logic of circularity. A circle from which filmmakers try, at crucial moments, to break free.

In 1988, Alain Masson in Positif questioned the Bazinian insistence on the camera’s registering and capturing of phenomenal reality, which is at the basis of so much theory and criticism of film. “The phenomenal has to do with the familiar and the unoriginal”, Masson remarks, “rather than with renewal and change”. Cinema is the place where mundane places, people and situations can be led astray from the regime of mere appearance, tricked into revealing another side, another face. (Masson’s own prime example is Avanti! [1972] by Billy Wilder.) And this is precisely what makes a narrative film clever, surprising, exciting: it engineers ways to renew or refresh the overly recognisable elements of reality – it produces originality out of everything that is given, generic, unoriginal.

We might recognise this process well in, for example, the realm of B cinema: smart, canny directors such as Joseph H. Lewis or Edgar G. Ulmer – or, later, Seijun Suzuki – always began from the most clichéd of images and narrative premises, before dislodging them in a delirium of invention. That came naturally to them, since they were dealing in stylistic modes characterised by artifice, first and last. It was a fast circuit, in that sense, from the cliché to its flipping.

But the drama of the détournement of appearances is harder to see in Michael Mann – and exponentially harder for him to achieve – because his work has (especially in the 1990s and 2000s) depended so heavily on a claim of surface realism – and (as in certain films by David Fincher, Steven Soderbergh, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Olivier Assayas, or the TV series The Wire) the associated rhetoric that the film will fundamentally follow and mimic the path of reality in all its waywardness and seeming shapelessness. This procedure became almost a religion, for a little while, in the film culture of the late 2000s due to the proselytising by influential critics including Kent Jones (who praised films that sought their “structural and dramatic inspiration in reality itself”) and Thierry Jousse. Filmmakers folded into this religion were suddenly hailed as ‘historians of the real’, rather than crafters of imagined screen worlds.

With Ferrari, Mann has freed himself from the self-imposed stranglehold of realism. He does not go completely the other way, into artifice – there are only very controlled impressionistic/expressionistic doses here. As always, Mann has followed his typical working procedures – the years of meticulous research, the relentless script revisions, the quest to faithfully reproduce the clothes, cars, toys, streets of Italy in 1957 – but, this time, to arrive at the starting point of what the film will be, rather than its omni-justifying end-point.

So, let’s start over. Appearances in film must be established, set up, then twisted, torn apart, elaborated upon. Many filmmakers work by this principle: Alfred Hitchcock, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Maurice Pialat, Abel Ferrara. Ferrari proceeds in exactly this way. The real beginning of Ferrari is not its pop-montage, but the opening of its fiction. What do we see? A landscape, a home, a couple sleeping in bed. Typical, familiar elements of exposition: soon the central character, Ferrari, will leave the bedroom, get dressed, check in on his young son Piero, and begin his working day.

But wait! Our conventional assumptions are, in crucial respects, quite wrong. That woman, Lina (Shailene Woodley), is not Ferrari’s wife but his long-time lover (at the same time, she is far more than a mistress on the side); Piero is indeed his biological son, but that paternity not yet been officially recognised (“Who speaks for him?”, as a later line of dialogue emphasises). We are not really in the spot of the hero’s everyday normality – and we were foolish to leap to that familiar conclusion at the outset. Ferrari’s unfolding physical gestures in this opening scene are odd, enigmatic – the way he begins his car and sends it sailing down the hill before he starts the engine; his racetrack skills of guiding and speeding the vehicle suddenly and ostentatiously in evidence – until we realise that he is hurrying to his other home, the one shared uneasily with his wife, Laura (Penélope Cruz). (There will be further narrative diversions before Enzo, in his words, goes to “deal with the day”.)

When Laura enters a room to greet her husband, what do we see? She wields a gun, much to Enzo’s shock and fright. But she does not fire it at him; instead, she moves the weapon to one side and punctures the wall. “Her gentleness, the Signora, is trying to shoot Il Commendatore”, Alda the maid drolly comments. But everything in this scene is surprise and diversion. Cruz testifies that she initially disliked this introduction of her character: would Laura be perceived, instantly and thereafter for the whole film, as a madwoman, a harpy, a bitch? Mann insisted that the depiction of her character had to begin exactly there, in this confusion of appearance and expectation. And he was right.

Head
Let’s jump to another, pervasive level of the film – its shot compositions and editing patterns. Just as there a will to interrogate, at the scripting stage, the given assumptions, clichés and stereotypes that cling to the main line of the action, there is in the mise en scène and découpage a scrupulous attentiveness to the moment-to-moment picturing (depiction, representation) of every scene, situation, gesture. It is as if Mann cannot bear collapsing into any conventional way of showing things – that would be not only unimaginative, but also a fundamental betrayal of the very particular dramatic truth that he seeks.

This magnificent, intransigent will to interrupt and find another way around cliché-picturing infuses every aspect of style, such as the seemingly random spots and speckles of lighting (inspired, Mann points out, by Caravaggio) captured brilliantly by DOP Erik Messerschmidt; or (as frequent in Mann) the stealthy musical contribution of Lisa Gerrard and Pieter Bourke, offering a modernist, dissonant slide to the Mozartian opera strains heard elsewhere on the soundtrack.

It is in the shot-to-shot decisions that the Mann Method truly reveals its hand. In the scene where Ferrari, alone, visits his son’s tomb, we witness this constantly generative doubt, indecision even, inherent to his driven mode of representation and fully visible in it: in the wide screen, he successively places Driver’s head now on the left of frame, now on the right; he is viewed in profile but also, less visibly (in terms of Enzo’s facial emotions), from the side, turned away in grief from the lens. In fact, Ferrari is a pictorial treatise on the filming of heads: they loom in the frame, they lurch, they solicit or evade our eye … Heads more than bodies (although there are also wonderful full-body-in-motion shots): because driving is all about the precise placement and focus of a head (with the body strapped into the vehicle); and because Mann, in this case, chases the signs of psyche, of inner truth, there above anywhere else.

Information and Intersection
If you study closely the opening 10 minutes of Ferrari – and you’ll surely need to watch it several times to catch it all – you will discover the subtle, indeed risky game that Mann often plays with conveying basic, sometimes crucial plot information. The events at the train station are given cryptically: there’s the arrival of a rival driver (Behra), and then of the person (Alfonso de Portago played by Gabriel Leone) who will become a new member of Ferrari’s team. They are both fleetingly identified, in their function, by the merest, partial glimpse of a racing-related object they each carry: a helmet for one, goggles for the other. Your spectating eye and mind have to work fast to register this.

There is also – and this is spelt out and dramatised more fully in the screenplay, which Mann then cut and compressed – an entire troupe of operatic singers who disembark from the train and file onto a bus. In the film itself, Mann simply shows, in a subsequent scene, that troupe exiting the vehicle to enter a building – which is an opera house (just doors away from Ferrari’s marital home), not shown (in typical ‘establishing shot’ fashion) from the front, but obliquely, from the side!

Right from this opening, large-scale alternation and arrangement of sequence-blocks, Ferrari sensitises us to another basic and profound question of cinema, since at least D.W. Griffith: how do diverse things, events, actions fit together? How does one thing happening here affect what will happen over there? What is mere coincidence, and what signals a relation of fate? Where are the connections, the intersections between pieces – and how do they happen? Hence the disconcerting introduction, far into the film, of a family group we have not previously seen – one member of which (its youngest) is headed out the door and straight for a tragic destiny at roadside.

On one level, this meditation on connection is an exact, superb analogy for the dangerous sport of racing itself: how can anybody know there is a faulty ‘cat’s eye’ in the road that will lead to such devastation and death in the little hamlet of Guidizzolo? On another level, it is also the film’s interpersonal drama: Ferrari is, after all, a man who does everything in his (considerable) power to keep his two worlds – that of Lina and that of Laura – rigorously apart, with one unaware of the other. Connection or intersection is what he definitely does not want to see happen.

A final note in this preliminary description of Ferrari, among the greatest films of 2023 or (depending on where you live and how you get to see movies) 2024. In 1982, Fredric Jameson (who died September 2024) mused on those popular artists (such as Hitchcock or Raymond Chandler) who, while leaning on “the ostensible fixation of the public in the molar pretexts of plot, mystery, narrative, suspense, and macro-temporality”, opened up more deeply – “by indirection and laterally, as it were, out of the corner of the eye” – those “perceptions”, normally repressed, that can help give us the capacity “to live the daily life of the present itself”.

Is there any filmmaker more obsessed than Michael Mann with circumventing the “molar” clichés of narrative and style, and the liberation of our (and his) intense perceptions of the eternal present moment?

MORE Mann: Ali, Collateral, The Insider, Heat, The Last of the Mohicans

© Adrian Martin 23 December 2024