I was out of town, so I only recently caught up with David Denby's fascinating article in last week's New Yorker about non-sequential narrative films. (The table of contents page oddly calls it "The New Non-Narrative Movies," which is a misnomer). His focus is mainly on the Inñárritu/Arriaga trilogy of "Amores Perros," "21 Grams" and "Babel," and Nolan's "Memento," although he does reference "Syriana," "Traffic," "Miami Vice," "Pulp Fiction," "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," and looks back to "Un Chien Andalou" (now there's a non-narrative film!), Resnais's "Hiroshima, Mon Amour," and "Muriel," and of course, "Betrayal." He also writes about the completely sequential "L'Avventura," which in my opinion has very little to do with his topic, except it is undeniably an "adventure in screen narrative," as the secondary headline on his article puts it. (Not to mention a ravishing and revolutionary breakthrough in film language, but now I'm the one digressing.)
Denby leaves out a lot of significant recent films that use this storytelling strategy, notably the Arriaga-scripted "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada," "Oldboy," "Irreversible," the fascinating "The Dead Girl" (which utilizes it in a very original way), but he made no claims to be comprehensive.
My immediate reaction to reading Denby's piece was to remember my interview with Michel Gondry. He spoke of how when the viewer is presented with two images that are out of context (say, a bed on a sandy beach), this disjuncture jolts a short circuit in the audience member's brain. Gondry calls this a "creative moment." The viewer must put the unexpected pieces together. This simple idea provides the basis for surrealism, horror movie posters, advertising, and a good deal of modern art. Splicing together pieces of jagged time works in more or less the same way. It pricks up an audience's senses and intensifies its engagement.
As Denby made clear, there's nothing avant-garde about this narrative gambit. But one of the ways to create something new is to look back to the past for inspiration. When you see something that hasn't been around for a while, it's very refreshing, or can even look to some like it's brand new. With enough imagination, as with "Eternal Sunshine..." or "Memento," it really is something new. Both of these films weave the time travel into the reality of the story; they are not literary devices like "Betrayal" or "Irreversible," or all the screenplays written by Arriaga, despite how effective those films are as storytelling. And for those of us who have seen all of the Inñárritu/Arriaga trilogy, the originality dissipates each time it's repeated. How many times are they going back to the same damned well? If they haven't already reached this conclusion, I humbly propose that they take a page off the book of Cuaron and Del Toro and move on.
Pondering all this did take my mind off my worries about the release date of "Smiley Face," now that Henry Winterstern is out at First Look Studios. But it also made me think about a film that I think is a masterpiece, and one of my favorite films of the last decade, Lee Chang-dong's "Peppermint Candy" (2000). Like "Memento," it starts at the end and goes back to the beginning. Unlike "Memento," it goes back twenty years instead of two weeks, and explores two decades of South Korean history through the story of its doomed protagonist. "Peppermint Candy" is considered by some in South Korea as the greatest film ever made in that country, no mean feat if you are familiar with Korean cinema. You haven't heard of it? Well...it's not on Netflix, although it did get a US DVD release recently. This is welcome but bittersweet news as it's unlikely it will ever get a theatrical release in this country.
I'll write more about "Peppermint Candy" in my next blog.
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March 8, 2007 - 6:01pm
