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Youth
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I think very strongly now that the more spectacular
you are, the more you are absorbed by the things you are trying to destroy. You
don't destroy anything at all, and it's you who are destroyed because of the
spectacle. (Jean-Luc Godard, 1969) (1)
If the heated debate around László Nemes’ Son of Saul (2015) at the moment of its initial release taught us
anything, it’s this: many people are extremely
suspicious of cinema’s potential for providing spectacular immersion – that is, if they are not entirely
predisposed against it from the word go.
But there is, after all, something extraordinarily
counter-intuitive about assuming a stand, in the name of cinema, against spectacle (as the book by
Jean-Louis Comolli put it, and as Godard summed up such a stand in the
immediate post-1968 sentiment quoted above). There is no single essence to
cinema as a medium, apparatus or art; intimately bound up in its core workings,
however, is an inescapable element of spectacle.
A projected film, before it’s anything else, is a
sheet, a plane to gaze at, whether big or small. This gazing – in a completely
natural, inevitable way – implies hopeful fascination, potential entrancement,
especially when married with a soundtrack. To deny this formative element of
spec(tac)ular fascination from the outset, to set oneself against it with all
one’s might (whether as critic or artist), can sometimes be understandable in
certain historic conjunctures – it can even be heroic in its extremity, as some
militant filmmaking proves. But it will always be a perverse undertaking,
flying in the face of this or any audiovisual, screen-based form.
The immersive part of the spectacular equation is a
relatively new evolution in cinema production, across many genres and in many
countries. What I’m thinking of here is a specific trope or figure: the handheld
camera that sticks (more or less) at the back of a mobile character, as if
glued as close as possible to their head, neck and shoulders, barrelling after
them as they cross streets, file down corridors, race from one significant site
to another …
There are already many variations of this trope
evident in world cinema, wielded to different expressive ends: what the
Dardennes do with it, as they follow the desperate lunges of their characters
into workplaces or woods, is immediately distinguishable from what Gaspar Noé does
with it, mimicking the out-of-it, where-am-I-now lurching of his anti-heroes
from one hallucinated space to the next; and that differs, again, from the more
strictly Hollywoodised use that Kathryn Bigelow makes of the trope in The Hurt Locker (2009) or Zero Dark Thirty (2012).
However, what unites the various manifestations of
immersive spectacle in contemporary cinema is a desire to raise the ante of
traditional screen realism (whether construed in external-objective or
inner-psychological terms) and situate us, as viewers, in an extreme intimacy
with a central character: we experience situations and sensations just as they
do, as they flash up around the bewildered subjectivity-point; we have no wider
knowledge of events or contexts than they do. (In Son of Saul, the trope is given a particularly intense twist, as
Saul is constantly, literally wrenched, manually, from one vector or goal to
another.) This is the heightened audiovisual rhetoric of an in-the-moment or
you-are-there viewing/listening experience. It can be done well or badly, used
well or badly, depending on the individual film. (Sean Baker’s Tangerine [2015], for example, seems to
me a weakly executed instance of the style.) But it should not be dismissed
from the get-go as fatally spectacular.
In the negative Cahiers
du cinéma review of Son of Saul by Jean-Philippe Tessé (to cite only one prominent and fairly typical example),
we can observe how a particular critical logic structures reaction to the film,
and what is then made of that reaction later, in the process of writing and
rationalisation. Placing the movie as the tent-pole of a veritable cinema of immersion that the magazine set
out to interrogate during Stéphane Delorme’s era as chief editor (2009-2020), a
strict linkage is made between this immersive experience and a presumed
ask-no-question attitude that amounts to the same “destruction by spectacle”
void that Godard evoked in ’69. The spectator is impressed is the sense of being crushed, evacuated of thought!
Nemes’ particular achievement in aesthetic stylisation
– his mastery, another quality viewed
dimly by the Delormeans – thus generates suspicion in the critic, even if the
craft of it is “incontestably brilliant”.
It all generates a true sensorial whole, a maelstrom of images and
sounds, an impression of confusion and speed that produces a forceful and
oppressive effect on the spectator, an effect of immersion, which reduces the
concentration-camp universe to the dimensions of an experience: it’s as if you
were there, so that you can now weigh up what is literally unbearable. We sense
genuine malice in this filmmaker, who is perfectly conscious of the stakes of
this representation … (2)
The dramatic stakes are ostensibly set a little lower
in Tom Shoval’s Youth, but the
characters’ actions, and the way the film depicts them, still resonate. After a Funny Games-style blast of loud rock during the opening
credits, the movie settles into the eerie, music-less ambience that marks so
many screen dramas in the contemporary immersive tradition. From its first
images, we are plunged into the type of anxious follow-shots that imply the
presence of a backstory without spelling it out – as with the Dardennes, we
know we will have to wait for any fill-in exposition of goals and motives to
arise when it can, in the naturalness of the forward flow of events.
Two teenagers: a guy stalks a girl who has just
finished school for the day. We assume a scary case of sex predation, which
turns out to be an entirely wrong assumption – and this sets a pattern for how Youth will play against the expectations
set by its seeming genre of naturalistic urban thriller.
The film plays a captivating game with its
unpredictable balance of everyday detail and suspenseful, dramatic episodes.
The everyday sphere in question is a family in Petah Tikva, a suburb of Tel
Aviv, facing serious financial trouble. Shaul (David Cunio) and Yaki (Eitan
Cunio) are twin brothers, the latter on leave from his military service – and
thus legally able to carry a rifle. Their kidnapping of Dafna (Gita Amely) is
an attempt to extort money from her wealthy family.
Much of the action is devoted to the dense, finicky,
time-mounting-up business of keeping Dafna still, silent, but hopefully still
alive in a basement that is uncomfortably nearby, physically, to the activities
and sites of their daily life. And even before that: transporting her to the
makeshift cell requires a public bus ride! This pair of guys make mistakes:
Shaul inadvertently calls out Yaki’s name in front of their captive; they don’t
anticipate various kinds of resourcefulness on Dafna’s part.
But whenever Youth seems to be about to veer into purely generic thrills and become a tense,
psychological power game of oneupmanship, another element kicks in and
rearranges the premise. Dafna fears rape or some other form of violent attack,
but the guys’ frustrations and anger never (mercifully) take those particular
forms. A scene in which we wonder whether Dafna can survive being bound and
gagged by amateurs is answered, on another plane, by a head-spinning revelation
about the nature of her relationship with her parents – a detail in itself
ordinary (if surprising), but completely derailing of the kidnapping scenario.
A family dinner sequence in which the brothers anxiously await a mobile phone
message is sent in another direction by the pesky intervention of a little
girl. (The film is a brilliant essay, in-between its lines, on the role of
telephone technology in everyday life!)
This constant back-and-forth between the eventful and
the quotidian is mirrored in the role that American popular cinema (such as the
Nicolas Cage vehicle Seeking Justice,
2011) plays in the unfolding scansion of events: pumped-up ideals and fantasies
come into collision with every kind of slip, contingency and interpersonal
misunderstanding.
Youth inevitably evokes allegorical
or emblematic readings in terms of national politics – this Israeli everyday is
intensely militarised, Dafna asks the twins if they are Arabs – but it sticks
close to the parameters of its small, circumscribed world. In this “physical
cinema” that Shoval, in an interview, extols – “One of the most substantial qualities of cinema is that you can see
bodies move. It is all about movement, and the movement tells you everything
about the character’s psychology. The physicality offers a pathway into the
soul” (3) – the real pay-off comes from an unexpectedly charged gesture between
Yaki and Shaul near the film’s end: their uncomfortable, endless embrace,
somewhere between a wrestling match (recall Jacques Doillon’s woefully
underrated Mes séances de lutte, 2013)
and a desperate cry of filial love.
Is this a cinema of immersion? Sure, as long as we
don’t automatically rule out the possibility that, in the linear sequencing of
events, in their staging, presentation and juxtaposition with neighbouring
scenes, we are able to deduce – just as much as in more obviously distanced,
classical drama – a wider context, a more comprehensive balance of judgements
beyond the subjective moments lived one at a time, so banally or fiercely, by
the characters.
1. Jonathan Cott, ‘Jean-Luc Godard: The Rolling Stone Interview’, 14 June 1969. back
2. Jean-Philippe Tessé, “L’expérience Auschwitz”, Cahiers du cinéma, no. 716 (November
2015), p. 34.
3. Neta Alexander, “Interview: Tom Shoval”, Film Comment blog, 18 August 2015.
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