El Sur (Victor Erice, 1983)

Omero Antonutti and Sonsoles Aranguren in El Sur

Cast: Omero Antonutti, Sonsoles Aranguren, Icíar Bollaín, Lola Cardona, Rafaela Aparicio, Aurore Clément, Maria Caro, Francisco Merino, José Vivó, Germaine Montero. Screenplay: Victor Erice, based on a story by Adelaida García Morales. Cinematography: José Luis Alcaine. Production design: Antonio Belizón. Film editing: Pablo G. del Amo. Music: Enric Granados. 

The ending of El Sur feels right: After her father's suicide, Estrella (Icíar Bollaín) falls ills and to recover goes to stay with her grandmother in el sur, the southern Spain that she has never seen, from which her father exiled himself because his Republican sympathies were at odds with the Nationalism of his father during the Spanish Civil War. We've seen how Estrella has imagined the South as warmly antithetical to the often chilly and sometimes bleak environs of Madrid where she and her parents live. She is also tantalized by the mysterious past of her father (Omero Antonutti), who once loved a woman who had a brief film career under the name Irene Rios (Aurore Clément), and who made a phone call to a number in the South shortly before he killed himself. Do we need to follow Estrella to the South to know that other mysteries will open themselves to her? And yet writer-director Victor Erice wanted to do so: He planned another 90 minutes to El Sur that would show us what Estrella did and found there, but was stymied by his producer's insistence that there was no money to film it. The remarkable thing is that the film as stands feels complete. What feels right about the ending of the film that we now have is that it's a part of what we know about Estrella: her solitary pursuit of things of mysterious things. This is a film about awakening and illumination: It begins with the dawn's light gradually penetrating the sleeping Estrella's room, and windows play a significant role in creating the film's symbolic texture. The scenes from the movie in which Irene Rios stars provide another kind of window. The most brilliant sequence in El Sur is the final meal Estrella shares with her father in a hotel dining room illuminated by high windows. She and her father are the only diners in this space, but a wedding party is taking place in an adjacent room whose windowed doors are covered by curtains. At one point Estrella goes to the doors and peeks into the room, whose music echoes that played at the party after her first communion, when the younger Estrella (Sonsoles Aranguren), dressed in white "like a bride," danced with her father. El Sur has the wholeness we expect of good films, and though we may wish that Erice had been allowed to give us more, we can be content with what we have. 

A Bigger Splash (Luca Guadagnino, 2015)

Matthias Schoenaerts and Ralph Fiennes in A Bigger Splash 

Marianne Lane: Tilda Swinton
Paul De Smedt: Matthias Schoenaerts
Harry Hawkes: Ralph Fiennes
Penelope Lannier: Dakota Johnson
Sylvie: Lily McMenamy
Mireille: Aurore Clément
Clara: Elena Bucci
Maresciallo: Corrado Guzzanti

Director: Luca Guadagnino
Screenplay: David Kajganich
Based on a novel by Alain Page and a screenplay by Jean-Claude Carrière and Jacques Deray
Cinematography: Yorick Le Saux
Production design: Maria Djurkovic
Film editing: Walter Fasano

Director Luca Guadagnino made his own bigger splash in 2017 with Call Me by Your Name, but his film called A Bigger Splash attracted admiring reviews two years earlier. Guadagnino has said that the two films and his 2009 I Am Love constitute a "Desire" trilogy. Erotic intrigue is at the heart of A Bigger Splash, which deals not with the eternal triangle so much as a fatal quadrangle. Marianne, a rock star, is recuperating from a throat operation on the island of Pantelleria with her lover, Paul, a documentary filmmaker, when her former lover, a music promoter named Harry, arrives with his daughter, Penelope. Neither Marianne nor Paul is especially pleased by having guests intrude on their solitude, especially since she has been ordered not to speak for a while. Marianne's voice problem is not the only sign of damage in the four characters: Paul is a recovering alcoholic who once attempted suicide, Harry is a manic egotist, and Penelope is a 17-year-old pretending to be 22 and -- we discover later -- speaks fluent Italian, a fact she chooses to hide from the others. She also lives with her mother in the States and neither she nor Harry knew of each other's existence until recently. There is a queasy touch of incestuousness to Harry's attentions to Penelope. Guadagnino and his actors keep the tension among the four characters at a low simmer for most of the film, and even after things reach the boiling point, the film deftly avoids melodramatic excess. Fiennes, usually a more reserved actor, gives an uncharacteristically flamboyant performance as Harry. The film oddly feels a little dated, like a French or Italian film from the 1960s, such as Jacques Deray's La Piscine (1969), the first filming of Alain Page's novel.

Les Rendez-vous d'Anna (Chantal Akerman, 1978)

Anna Silver: Aurore Clément
Heinrich Schneider: Helmut Griem
Ida: Magali Noël
Hans: Hanns Zischler
Anna's mother: Lea Massari
Daniel: Jean-Pierre Cassel

Director: Chantal Akerman
Screenplay: Chantal Akerman
Cinematography: Jean Penzer

Storytelling is all about information -- what's disclosed and what's concealed, what's shared and what's withheld. It's a kind of tease: How much can you let an audience know and how can you keep them guessing? Usually, but not always, the first bit of information a storyteller gives the audience is a title -- what the story is about. Les Rendez-vous d'Anna is about as straightforward as a title gets: Chantal Akerman is about to tell us a story about someone named Anna and her meetings. Beyond that, it's a matter of waiting for more information. The film starts with a long take, carefully framed as Akerman's shots usually are, almost symmetrical, rigidly squared off: a railroad platform with an opening for stairs leading down to an Ausgang, an exit. There are train lines to the left and the right, and beyond the opening for the stairs there is a telephone booth in the center of the frame, though the placement of the telephone booth doesn't draw special attention to it -- we barely recognize it for what it is until it's in use. The platform is open, so that we can see a bit of the urban distance, but there are no people in sight. We wait, and wait, until finally we hear a train approaching. It pulls to a stop on our right, and soon people appear, apparently having descended from the train somewhere behind the camera, and begin to enter the stairwell. One person, a woman, detaches herself from the crowd and walks beyond the opening to the telephone booth where we see her, from a distance, make a call. The train leaves and soon she emerges from the booth and comes toward us, then turns and descends the stairs. And that's all the information you get in the first two or three minutes of the film. We don't even know where we are yet; we assume that it's a city in Germany, but it could also be Austria or Switzerland.

Akerman's films have sometimes been unfairly likened to "watching paint dry," mostly because she seems to feel no urgency to tell us the story. She leaves it to us to glean whatever we can from her long takes, not zooming in or cutting to closeups to give us a sense of what may be important in a scene. Eventually we will learn that the train station is in Cologne, Germany, and that the woman is Anna Silver, a filmmaker who has come there for the premiere of one of her films. We don't know whom she has called, but it's a good guess that it was to arrange one of her meetings, the first of which is with a German who goes back to her hotel with her after the screening. They make love, but Anna tells him she doesn't want to make the relationship more permanent. The next day, he says, is his daughter's birthday, and he wants Anna to visit his home, which he shares with his mother and his daughter. During the visit, he tells her about his life, about wartime hardships, about his wife's running away "with a Turk," and much else. (A good deal of the film's subtext concerns Europe in the recession-haunted late 1970s.) At the end of their meeting, we realize we know more about him than we do about Anna herself.

Aurore Clément plays Anna as an enigmatically dispassionate woman, someone whom people confide in almost as if they're filling the silence that surrounds her. Over the course of the film she spends almost as much time silently looking out of windows as she does in actual encounters with other people. She has four more "meetings" -- with one of her mother's friends, with a stranger she encounters on a train, with her own mother, and with a lover in Paris. By the end of the film we have learned only snippets of information about Anna, including the fact that she has had a relationship with a woman in Italy, whom she tries to call several times during the days she spends in Cologne and Brussels before her return to Paris, where she currently lives. Her life is a rootless one: In the last scene, she listens to the messages on her answering machine, one of which tells her that she has more meetings the following week in several cities in Switzerland.

The title is accurate: This is a film about meetings, none of them especially conclusive, and none resolving into anything of permanence. Les Rendez-vous d'Anna is, like Akerman's Je Tu Il Elle (1974) and Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975), a test of a viewer's patience, of one's willingness to sort through the information presented and to assemble it into something that coheres. But also like them, it's a film that rewards the effort, by sharply reordering one's expectations of what a film can be, how it can illuminate the nature of ordinary exchanges with other people, how it draws attention to the mysteries of the self, and how it can linger in the memory more durably than less demanding ones.

Watched on Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984)

Nastassja Kinski and Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas

Wim Wenders's Paris, Texas has so much going for it: the performances of Harry Dean Stanton and Dean Stockwell, the dialogue by Sam Shepard, the cinematography of Robby Müller, the music by Ry Cooder. It won every major award at Cannes. So why do I feel like it's an unsatisfying film? It's not that I demand resolution from a work of art: That's a criterion long absent from modern and postmodern criticism. Life doesn't resolve itself, so why should art? I think it's partly that Paris, Texas resolves too much -- namely, its initial mystery: Why is Travis Henderson (Stanton) wandering in the desert, speechless and amnesiac? But the film doesn't make the explanation resonate with anything other than the failure of a marriage -- or perhaps two, since the marriage of Walt (Stockwell) and Anne (Aurore Clément) seems to be held together only by Travis's son, Hunter (Hunter Carson), whom they have been raising since his disappearance. It's as if L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960) had concluded with an explanation for Anna's disappearance, when in fact that unresolved disappearance is the whole point of the film: a catalyst for the experiences of Claudia and Sandro. Are we supposed to feel that the reunion of Jane (Nastassja Kinski) with Hunter -- a sex worker and an uprooted child -- is a kind of closure? It was Jane, after all, who gave up Hunter to Walt and Anne after Travis's first disappearance. For me, the first half of Paris, Texas is brilliant moviemaking: among other things in its superb use of landscape -- both the bleakness of Texas and the freeway- and airport-choked Southern California -- as a correlative for the lives of Travis and Walt. It's when Travis takes Hunter on the road in a needle-in-a-haystack search for Jane that the film falls apart. Wenders had already made a film about this kind of search: Alice in the Cities (1974), which seems to me a more satisfying film than Paris, Texas because it doesn't overreach itself, it doesn't complicate things with too many backstories and too much striving toward significance. It comes as no surprise to learn that the film was only half-written when it was begun, and that Shepard, who had been called away to work on another film, literally phoned in the climactic narrative in which Travis explains his disappearance. Though it's a tribute to the brilliance of both Shepard and Stanton that the scene comes off as well as it does, it plays as a set piece, and not as an organic part of what has gone before.