THEY ENDURE
by Chris Dashiell

While switching channels on the radio today, I heard a preacher - one of those unctuous gasbags who seem to be everywhere these days - railing about our culture and how we have to return to God - "for the sake of the children." Of course, whenever people want to shove their religion (i.e. politics) down your throat, they're doing it "for the children." Children are made the stalking horse for every sort of adult problem. It doesn't seem to occur to people that children are like a mirror for their own ugliness, and whenever they point a blaming figure at some deleterious effect on kids, they're telling on their own sick selves.

As inevitable response, it seems that a lot of the more truthful cinema in recent years has been about children. I don't mean Disney, but stuff like La Promesse and George Washington and Set Me Free and Yi Yi and many of the Iranian films. Films that are free of patronizing attitudes and mythology concerning childhood, or at least try to be. Children in these films express a sense of reality which is raw and genuine, and they often communicate our condition more accurately, because they haven't yet become sophisticated in the art of lying.

I thought of RATCATCHER, the astounding debut of Scottish directory Lynne Ramsay, when I heard that preacher. This film has not a trace of smugness, or the superiority of moral virtue which is blind to reality. Nor is it too harsh, or shrill, as I tend to be when I get indignant (as I am now). Ramsay takes the point of view of a child in the slums of Glasgow, and she holds it there with full compassion and engagement, like a silent advocate. This is what "for the children" should mean, if it means anything at all.

The picture opens with a boy twirling around inside of a window curtain. He is playing, but the curtain also seems to engulf him. Suddenly his mother comes from offscreen and gives him a slap. We are back in the real world, and we follow this boy as he steals away to play with a friend in the fetid canal behind his house. Before we know it, in a cruel reversal of our identification, the boy has drowned in the dirty water, and we realize that this is the story of the other boy, James (William Eadie), who runs away in terror and believes himself responsible for his friend's death.

The story takes place during a garbage strike in the 1960s. Plastic bags filled with trash litter the neighborhood of run down tenements. Rats are everywhere. James' father is a pathetic drunk with little warmth towards his son. His weary-eyed mother shows affection to her three children, although the demands of life are too much for her. Ramsay is careful to depict the good moments as well as the bad - this is a poor struggling family like many others. But the brutal conditions, the squalor and ignorance, make it hard for anyone to do much more than try to survive, day by day. Ratcatcher focuses on the ways James tries to break free, if only in his mind.

The film has a gentle, poetic style, which lends strange dignity to its main character. The young Eadie portrays the inarticulate boy with a seriousness and depth that belies his ungainly appearance. James is confused, but not simple. We witness an inner conflict between his essential goodness and the callousness which the world seems to require of him. The friendship he develops with an older girl (Leanne Mullen) who is treated as a slut by the local toughs, is touching and believable in the way it reveals both his nature as a child and as an emerging sexual being. The picture also has moments of intense humor which shine in the midst of sadness - Ramsay uses playfully surreal effects to convey some of the relief which fantasy can provide.

James gets in the habit of taking a bus to "the end of the line," an empty place on the outskirts of town where a new housing development is being built. These sequences invest the mundane with an extraordinary quality. Occasionally, though, the director strains too much for effect. It's obvious that Terrence Malick is one of her influences. As she makes more films, her own style will achieve more definition. As it is, Ratcatcher is one of the most accomplished first features in recent years.

It seems that the film hasn't gotten much distribution in the States. People told me they didn't want to see it because it's "depressing." Personally, the only movies I find depressing are bad ones. For me, the most truthful films are the ones I find exhilirating. Today I shut off that lying blather on my radio, and I thought about Ratcatcher. That's the truth.

Fortunately, movies can provide many different kinds of rewards, and I'm not one to denigrate a genre piece, or light entertainment, if it's done well. I enjoyed MEMENTO, the time-bending second effort by Christopher Nolan, without expecting it to be something else than it was intended to be, or overestimating its significance.

The plot is actually much less involved than it would seem from a description. This is the natural result of a wild premise. Leonard (Guy Pearce) is out to kill the man who murdered his wife. But, due to a blow to the head he suffered during the attack, he is unable to create new memories - he forgets everything after a few minutes, and is only able to go forward in his quest through a complex system of self-cues, consisting of snapshots with notes on them, as well as various tattoos on his body that provide "facts" that he needs to remember. Leonard's experience, therefore, is one of always awakening into a situation of which he knows nothing. He has to piece everything together from scratch. Nolan cleverly simulates the same experience in the audience by telling the story backwards - the last event in the temporal sequence comes first, and the first last. In between each discrete sequence is a long black and white section that ties them all together in an oblique way.

To describe any further than this is to spoil the fun. I use the word "fun" guardedly, because the mood of Memento is really quite tense, sometimes harrowing. It's the fun of a suspense thriller, but on a different, rather more cerebral level. For all the jigsaw puzzle aspects of the story, the interest of the film for me was in the creation of a sense of disjointed time and memory. Nolan plays with narrative structure overtly, and that's his interest as well - not character or even plot, really, but the way narrative itself relies on an assumed structure within the mind. By messing up that structure, the movie creates feelings of dread and uncertainty which are pleasantly creepy.

To delve deeper - perhaps to go into realms of metaphysical significance - Nolan would have had to make a different (and probably much longer) film. It's not a spiritual film, or even a very emotional one. It's analytical, like a game you play in your mind. Even so, I found the dryness of the conception a welcome relief from the usual self-importance of the crime genre. Pearce is good, actually pretty scary, in a role that requires a mixture of purposeful intensity with a sense of being completely lost. The other players (Joe Pantoliano and Carrie-Anne Moss) are just pawns in Nolan's meta-game.

I like the way Memento screwed around with my sense of reality. The way I see it, that's one of the many reasons to go to a flick. Nolan is fond of fragmented time structures - his first picture, which was much less interesting than this one, used a similar device. I'm guessing that he will need to break out of this mold in his next film, before it turns into a stylistic tic. In the meantime I wish him, and his movie, success.

Spring cleaning:

I really liked Pollock, especially the sequences where Ed Harris is painting. I mean, it actually looks like an artist painting, and that's a hard thing to simulate. Harris is vey fine (certainly much more deserving than Russelus Maximus), and so is Marcia Gay Harden. If I may, however, offer one criticism: Pollock posits its artist as inarticulate about any ideas behind his art, with Harden's Lee Krasner providing intellectual underpinnings for her husband, which the film essentially dismisses as irrelevant. The truth is otherwise, I think. Pollock had definite ideas and influences, and he was not shy about expressing them either. Nonetheless, I recommend the film because it has an emotional honesty which is unusual for a movie about an artist.

I hesitated to say anything about Agnes Jaoui's The Taste of Others, because Shari Rosenblum pretty much covered it in her review. I do want to say that the film offers a lesson for aspiring writers - have compassion for all your characters. The script (by Jaoui and husband Jean-Pierre Bacri) pokes some fun at a philistine businessman with a crush on an actress, but the joke is on us too, because this man's sincerity and aspiration turns out to be worthy of our respect - indeed more so than any jaded intellectual sensibility. Good writers show us things we don't already know instead of merely confirming the comfort of our prejudices.

I'm a complete novice when it comes to the Hong Kong martial arts genre. After seeing Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, I rented A Chinese Ghost Story, out of curiosity. The latter was made for a fraction of the cost of the former. The script, the acting, the visual style, all are cheesy and sensationalist in comparison to the smooth texture, luscious color, and crisp editing of the Ang Lee film. So someone explain to me - why is it that my memory of Crouching Tiger continues to fade, with very little feeling attached to the experience, while I still recall every tacky detail of A Chinese Ghost Story with vivid precision and enjoyment? Maybe the answer would help explain the difference between a big budget and a big heart.

CineScene, 2001