Kings of the Road (Wim Wenders, 1976)

Rüdiger Vogler and Hanns Zischler in Kings of the Road

Bruno Winter: Rüdiger Vogler
Robert Lander: Hanns Zischler
Pauline: Lisa Kreutzer
Robert's Father: Rudolf Schündler
Man Whose Wife Killed Herself: Marquard Bohm
Paul: Hans Dieter Trayer
Theater Owner: Franziska Stömmer

Director: Wim Wenders
Screenplay: Wim Wenders
Cinematography: Robby Müller, Martin Schäfer
Film editing: Peter Przygodda

Three hours is a considerable chunk of time to invest in a film whose plot and characters are going nowhere, but Wim Wenders somehow pulls it off in Kings of the Road -- a title that seems inevitable for a film that ends with Roger Miller's song, "King of the Road," but whose German title is a little more descriptive: Im Lauf der Zeit, "in the course of time." For time is what the central character, Bruno Winter, has plenty of. All he has to do is drive from one small German town to another, servicing the projectors in movie houses. These are towns set aside from the Wirtschaftswunder that Rainer Werner Fassbinder, for example, satirizes in his films: They are in decline, and the sparseness of the population Winter encounters is striking. They are also along the border between West and East Germany, a split that's taking a psychic toll on their residents. Though he's very much a loner, indeed wallowing in his loneliness, Winter takes in a companion, Robert Lander, whom he encounters one day trying to kill himself by driving his speeding VW bug into the Elbe. The car refuses to sink until Lander finally climbs out through the sunroof and wades ashore with his suitcase. In the course of time, Winter and Lander become friends, and Kings of the Road becomes a very German version of the buddy movie. They're not Butch and Sundance, but simply two malcontents who find themselves cast together by circumstance. Much of Kings of the Road was improvised, with Wenders confessing that he would lose sleep at night worrying about what he might shoot the next day. It becomes a portrait of a generation, the one born at the end of World War II, in search of itself, as well as a portrait of a country trying to recover from that war's lingering traumas. Inevitably, both Winter and Lander confront the past: Lander in a visit to his father, from whom he has been estranged for several years, and Winter by a visit to the abandoned house on an island in the Rhine where he spent his childhood. Though its length and plotlessness inevitably result in some slackness, the film feels to me oddly more resonant than some of Wenders's more tightly constructed ones.

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

Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas, 2014)

Kristen Stewart and Juliette Binoche in Clouds of Sils Maria

Maria Enders: Juliette Binoche
Valentine: Kristen Stewart
Jo-Ann Ellis: Chloë Grace Moretz
Klaus Diesterweg: Lars Eidinger
Christopher Giles: Johnny Flynn
Rosa Melchior: Angela Winkler
Henryk Wald: Hanns Zischler

Director: Olivier Assayas
Screenplay: Olivier Assayas
Cinematography: Yorick Le Saux
Production design: François-Renaud Labarthe
Film editing: Marion Monnier

Olivier Assayas's Clouds of Sils Maria demands almost as much attention after you've finished it as it did while you were watching/reading it. The set-up is this: An actress, Maria Enders, is asked to perform in a revival of the play that made her famous when she was only 18. Now that she's in her 40s, however, she will play the older woman who has a relationship with the character she earlier played. She accepts reluctantly, and then wants to back out when she finds that the younger actress, Jo-Ann Ellis, who has been cast in her original role is a Hollywood star best known not only for working in sci-fi blockbusters but also for her off-screen affairs that draw the attention of the paparazzi and Internet gossip sites. However, Maria's personal assistant, Valentine, thinks Jo-Ann is a good actress who has been exploited by the media, and persuades Maria to take the role. Maria and Valentine retreat to the home of the play's author, who has recently died, in Sils Maria, a Swiss village, where Valentine helps Maria learn her lines. As the film progresses, the lines of the play echo not only Maria's own feelings about growing older, but also the somewhat ambiguous relationship between Maria and Valentine. Indeed, it's often not entirely clear whether actress and assistant are reciting the lines of the play or are voicing their own feelings for each other. And then the casting of the film brings out another layer of meaning: Stewart is best-known for the Twilight movies, precisely the kind of Hollywood film that Maria turns up her nose at when she first hears about Jo-Ann's career. Assayas, who also wrote the screenplay, deftly juggles all these layers of art and reality, but the film would be nothing without Stewart's superb performance, which won her the César Award in France as well as the best supporting actress awards from the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics. There are those who think the film is more talk than substance and that it feels like a "high-concept" product: Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966) meets All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950), perhaps. But seeing Stewart interact with Binoche more than justifies it for me.