Stomping Ground
Three from the Vancouver Film Festival
by
Howard Schumann

On April 20, 1999, two boys wearing trench coats carried a daunting arsenal of weapons harnessed with military web gear into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, and systematically gunned down thirteen students. Gruesome though it was, the incident was just one of eight fatal high school shootings between 1997 and 1999. These traumatizing events began a debate about what was wrong with the nation's youth, an issue that is the subject of Gus Van Sant's Elephant.

Winner of the Golden Palm at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, Elephant is a brilliant and deeply affecting film that makes a courageous attempt to grasp the malaise of today's youth culture. Van Sant does not attempt to explain Columbine or uncover its underlying causes, and there is no revealing epiphany. His film is a highly stylized, dreamlike tone poem that defies linear conventions and is almost surreal in its approach. Using flashbacks and recurring images from different points of view, the film captures the mood and tone of its adolescent world: its perceptions, its self-absorption, and ultimately its darkest instincts.

The camera is a detached observer, and the strength of the film lies in its acute power of observation and detail. Van Sant shows us all the surface rituals: the girl cheerleaders, the boys playing football, the locker-lined hallways, the academic discussions, yet an ineffable feeling of loneliness pervades. The picture features impeccable acting by a group of non-professionals from the Portland, Oregon area. Each character is introduced separately and we see them going about their business on a seemingly ordinary school day. The steadicam-tracking camera follows them as they walk through the sterile halls that seem endless. The school appears without life -- a place where one feels a desperate sense of loss.

We see John (John Robinson), a blonde-haired surfer type, take over the driving from his father who has had too much to drink, then get called to task by an administrator for being late for school. Eli (Elias McConnell) is a photographer who asks classmates, including John, to pose for pictures. Football player Jordan (Jordan Taylor) meets his girlfriend Carrie (Carrie Finklea) for lunch. Three friends Nicole (Nicole George), Brittany (Brittany Mountain), and Acadia (Alicia Miles) gossip and argue about who is whose best friend. Michelle (Kristen Hicks) refuses to wear shorts, is admonished by her teacher, and then goes to work in the library. The paths of these students crisscross throughout the film and each has their own destiny to fulfill when the violence erupts.

The main protagonists, Alex (Alex Frost) and Eric (Eric Deulen) are modeled after Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold of Columbine. When we first meet Alex, he is being shunned by his fellow students, called names and pelted with spitballs in science class. Alex is more outgoing and creative, Eric more passive, but their personalities complement each other. Alex and Eric wait at home until a strange package arrives in the mail while Alex plays Beethoven's "Fur Elise" on the piano. When they return to school, they are dressed in combat gear and ready to kill.

Rather than giving us pat answers, Van Sant bases his approach on the elusiveness of truth, and our insatiable desire to know more. The imagery and camerawork are almost painfully beautiful, while the disconnected narrative deliberately withholds closure. On top of all this, the pacing is superb, slowly building up the almost unbearable tension. When it is finally released, the explosion hits you with a frightening energy that is as unforgettable as it is chilling.

Today's large urban centers consist not only of tourist attractions, museums, and up-scale shops, but also include the homeless living in cardboard tents underneath bridges, and the thousands of isolated apartment dwellers who rarely venture out, content to live an anonymous existence. Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's film Distant, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes this year, is an unsparing look at two such people, men who drift through life without making connection.

Mahmut (Muzaffer Özdemir) is a divorced photographer who works for a ceramic tile company in Istanbul. He lives alone and doesn't socialize, preferring to spend his nights watching old movies, fashion shows, and pornography on television rather than seeking out the attractions of his cosmopolitan surroundings. Mahmut's only contact is with one woman, a prostitute, but there is little passion or joy in their encounters. His ex-wife (Zuhal Gencer Erkaya) has remarried and it is clear that he feels a deep sense of loss, especially when she announces that she and her new husband will soon relocate to Canada. Mahmut's daily routines are disrupted when a cousin, Yusuf (Emin Toprak), an unemployed villager, comes to stay with him in the city while looking for work aboard a ship. At first Mahmut is caring but he soon grows impatient with his sometimes slow-witted relative and berates him for his sloppy habits.

Yusuf goes through the motions of looking for work. He pretends that he is waiting for answers to his job applications while he hangs out in bars and wanders the streets alone following attractive women, but his attempts to connect with the opposite sex are fruitless. Though they share the same apartment, the two men rarely speak, and a feeling of lethargy pervades the film. In a revealing segment, while driving in Anatolia on a photographic tour, Mahmut is moved by an idyllic scene but his ennui is so pervasive that he cannot bring himself to stop and take a picture.

Ceylan uses little music, minimal dialogue, and not much action. He simply records the pain etched on the faces of the characters alongside images suggesting the indifference of nature: the Bosphorus pounding against the quay, the dogs barking in the street, the sound of bells, the forbidding Istanbul winter, and the cries of children. With his use of meditative silences, long shots, and a static camera, Ceylan has been compared to Tarkovsky, Kiarostami, and Tsai Ming-liang. His style is distinctive and demanding, but I had mixed feelings about the film. Distant captures the sadness of contemporary life without intimacy, but the film's lack of character development and the repetition of strategies devoted to avoiding communication eventually became tedious and left me uninvolved.

Only yesterday, the last drive-in theater closed in Vancouver. The old movie palaces of my childhood where patrons paid 25 cents to watch a double bill, plus news and cartoons, while listening to the Wurlitzer organ during intermission, are now shopping malls or revivalist churches. In Goodbye Dragon Inn, set in Taipei, Tsai Ming-liang pays tribute to an experience of cinema that is dying. The decaying Fu-Ho theatre theater is about to be torn down but still welcomes the outcasts of society: old men, gay cruisers, the crippled and the lonely, and the ghosts and spirits from a different age. With the rain coming down heavily outside, the theater still attracts few patrons, and those it does are more interested in furtive sexual contacts than watching the film -- stalking their prey through sterile corridors, looking for any shred of human comfort.

In the audience is a gay Japanese man. Only two other people watch the 1961 kung fu classic Dragon Inn by King Hu, considered one of the best martial arts films of all time. A woman with a clubbed foot runs the ticket booth and hobbles around the empty theater, hoping that the projectionist will notice her, but he makes a special point of looking the other way. We soon discover that the two older men watching the movie were the stars of Dragon Inn, basking in their glory days. It is not clear whether they are real or spirits from the past, yet now they sit in the almost empty theater watching their own movie and begin to cry. When the lights come up, there is only row upon row of empty seats.

Tsai Ming-liang is known for his minimalist style, and this film stretches the style to its outer limits. There is no dialogue until about 45 minutes into the picture, and then no more until about 20 minutes after that. Though the mood is somber, the movie has a deadpan humor that redeems its sense of desperation, and a humanism that raises our hopes. Fashioned with poetic solitude and emotional power, Goodbye Dragon Inn is a haunting elegy for a way of life that survives only in the minds of ghosts and old film critics.

©2003 Howard Schumann
CineScene