Open Wounds
by Chris Dashiell

The Dogme 95 film movement, a group of Danish directors who broke away from studio styles in order to revitalize the cinema, has received its share of critical derision, especially since its members have cut corners on their own rules (no music or sets, only natural lighting, etc.) more than once. Indeed, some Dogme films have been less than stellar, but this just goes to show that, as always, much depends on the artist's vision and skill.

In Susanne Bier's Open Hearts, the Dogme strategy - with its jump cuts, hand-held camera, and intense close-ups - works beautifully, fashioning a deeply personal drama from the raw materials of melodrama. It centers on a fateful instant that turns romantic bliss into tragedy. The first scenes show the domestic happiness of a young couple, Joachim and Cecilie (Nikolaj Lie Kaas and Sonja Richter), who are planning to get married. Then with the opening of a car door, everything is changed. Joachim is run over, his spine crushed - he survives, but is paralyzed from the neck down. When he learns the news, we can see him plummet into rage and self-pity. Cecilie’s tears and her desire to help seem like insults to him, and he angrily tells her to leave him.

Now, even though the accident was not anyone’s fault, Marie (Parika Steen), the woman driving the car that ran into Joachim, is wracked with guilt. Her husband Niels (Mads Mikkelsen) happens to be a doctor at the hospital, and partly at his wife’s request, he talks to the grieving Cecilie, doing what he can to comfort her. Over time, as Joachim continues to be bitter and rejecting, Cecilie clings to Niels, but what began as a well-intentioned attempt to help turns into a love affair. The film’s focus then turns to Niels and the destructive effect his affair has on his wife and three children.

It sounds a bit like a soap opera, but Bier maintains a style of uncompromising realism that explores feelings more subtly than one expects. The acting is very strong by everyone involved (with standout work by Kaas) and the natural style just keeps taking things deeper and deeper. Even if Niels falling for Cecilie seems like a deplorable surrender to a midlife crisis (she's a good deal younger and prettier than his wife), the careful attention to Niels as a bewildered, fallible, well-intentioned person lets us understand his experience as well. All four main characters have their reasons, and their sorrows - Bier and co-writer Anders Thomas Jensen are sensitive to how the desires born of loss can get the better of us. Occasionally the film uses an interesting (and un-Dogme) technique of showing Cecilie's fantasy or desire through grainy shots of what she would like to see - such as her paralyzed fiancée waving goodbye.

Bier's camera keeps gazing at the characters, giving them time to move, and sometimes surprise us with their vulnerabilities, rather than trying to let the melodramatic situation do the work for them. This technique succeeds because it puts the audience inside the dilemma to experience it, is if we were going through it instead of just watching it. I suspect that the Dogme method is especially appropriate for the drama of relationships, breaking free from the forms of romanticism and stereotype that prevent it from feeling fresh in the hands of conventional, mainstream filmmakers.

There are no villains here; everyone’s actions and mistakes are believable and comprehensible, even as the story pierces your heart. Open Hearts is wonderful at portraying the fears, desires, self-deceptions and just plain confusion that can upset the fragile balance of our relationships, and yet how love somehow endures even through the darkest times.

Divine Intervention, a film by Palestinian director Elia Suleiman, depicts life in the Occupied Territories through a series of scenes or sketches that don’t really add up to a plot, but are designed to recreate the feeling of being stuck in a homeland that’s a kind of no-man’s land. Opening in surrealistic fashion, with a wounded Santa Claus being chased through the hills of Nazareth by a gang of boys, the film then shows us a corner of the city where hostile neighbors dump garbage in each other’s yards, wait for a bus that never arrives, and other darkly comic yet disturbing moments. The scenes, like the people, seem disconnected, until you gradually piece things together into a portrait of a fragmented community under constant pressure. The off-hand style, like a series of visual non-sequiters, is far more unsettling than a linear presentation, with dramatic emphasis, could ever have been.

One of the people we observe is an old man who we see sitting and reading his mail, or cursing his neighbors under his breath while he waves good morning to them from his car. When he falls ill, his son, played by Suleiman himself, arrives to take care of him, and the film then focuses on this strangely quiet young man (in fact, we never hear him speak) who spends much of his time with a beautiful unnamed woman (Manal Khader) staring at an Israeli checkpoint where the guards bully the motorists trying to get through.

Suleiman calls the film a “chronicle of love and pain.” Certainly his humor and satire is set against a background of pain - as when he shows an Israeli officer pull a blindfolded Palestinian prisoner out of his van so that he can give directions to a French tourist, or when the main character floats a balloon with Yassir Arafat’s face on it over the checkpoint, and the officers have to call headquarters for permission to shoot it down.

If I were to describe all the film's various incidents, it would make it sound like a laugh riot, but it's actually a very quiet, melancholy experiment in subjective style. The overall impression is numbness, accentuated by Suleiman’s use of the static camera, rigid visual composition in the frame, and silence. From time to time, we see the main character looking at a wall covered with what looks like index cards or post-it notes. It could be the storyboard for the film, which seems to resemble life on the West Bank in its provisional quality. Part of the overall strategy of the film is to make the audience feel stuck, just like the people in the movie.

Suleiman presents a political stance - obviously he opposes the occupation - only through its personal ramifications. The point is to let us see his world in all its absurdity and contradiction, including the pettiness and bad behavior of Palestinians toward one another. You have to look for the love in the quiet moments between the man and his father, or in the eyes of the mysterious woman, who may be some kind of angel. In the film’s climactic sequence, she turns into a Ninja fighter who repels the attacks of a group of dancing Israeli sharpshooters. It's both funny and upsetting, which is exactly what Suleiman is after, I think. He acknowledges anger and revenge fantasies as part of the mental picture, even when they reflect actual events (the film was, in fact, shot prior to the wave of suicide bombings that occurred after Sharon took office). Enacting this on a screen, with all the irony, pathos, and bizarre evocations that go along with this, seems like a good way of accessing the feelings buried under years of rhetoric.

Divine Intervention is bound to offend extremists on both sides, because it doesn’t come from a place of ideology, but humanity. Suleiman wants not only to amuse, but to puzzle and provoke us with his weird mixture of melancholy and vaudeville, and in that he succeeds quite well.

David Cronenberg has given us many films that explore the darkest places in the human psyche, crafting horror stories in which the monsters turn out to be ourselves. His latest film, Spider, is his subtlest and most meticulously crafted work to date.

Adapted from his own novel by Patrick McGrath, Spider is the story of Dennis Clegg (Ralph Fiennes), a haggard former mental patient who arrives at a London boarding house, released into the same neighborhood he grew up in. Shuffling furtively about, constantly mumbling under his breath, Clegg scribbles in a secret notebook, using an alphabet only he can understand, exploring the mystery of his childhood.

We see Clegg revisit his past as an onlooker, standing in the background as he watches his younger self and his parents, played by Gabriel Byrne and Miranda Richardson, go through the horrifying events that led to the fracture of his psyche. The long-suffering mother bonds with her only son, whom she nicknames Spider, while the angry alcoholic father cheats on her with a vulgar whore he picks up in a pub. But nothing is quite what it seems, since all is viewed through the distorted lens of Spider’s disturbed mind. As the story progresses, the film’s world is gradually infested with hallucination.

Fiennes, with an intense fearful stare and a half-strangled voice, gives an incredibly focused, almost unbearably physical performance as Spider. This is one of those cases where an actor triumphs by losing himself totally into a character. Miranda Richardson is also outstanding as the madly shifting mother figure. Cronenberg’s style is both haunting and abstract, simpler and more focused than usual for him. Although the picture seems to take place in some semblance of the outer world, it’s really a journey within the shattered soul of a man searching for himself.

There seem to be a few Cronenberg fans who were disappointed with Spider. I've heard complaints that it's too slow and restrained, that it doesn't have the shock value that has come to be expected from a Cronenberg picture. It seems to me that the director's identification with the aesthetic of the splatter/horror film works against a proper appreciation of his intent. Cronenberg has always used the horror genre, and other "low" culture elements, as a springboard to explorations of the self, the body, sexuality, and the more repressed aspects of social life. If his audiences have taken him for a mere shock-meister, then it's their loss that they don't appreciate Spider, which avoids sensationalism the better to construct its little madhouse of psychic tension.

And marvelously well-constructed it is, with its consistent doubling of material objects as symbols of various aspects of Clegg's mental disorder, and the casual shifting between illusion and reality mirrored by the film's own coolly distanced approach. It's difficult to do this sort of thing, and even harder to do it well - Cronenberg succeeds in turning the screen into a stage for the enactment of one anguished mind's obsessive thought process. You have to be willing to be Spider - to recognize the Spider in yourself - in order to catch the film's nuances. Cronenberg assumes that the effort is worthwhile - it's a sign of maturity in an artist, and this film is the best work he's done in years.

©2003 Chris Dashiell
CineScene