Richard Kelly, Risk-Taking Director Pushes the Studio Button (The New York Times)

October 25, 2009

By ARI KARPEL

West Hollywood

AT the beginning of Richard Kelly’s new film, “The Box,” a mysterious parcel is delivered to a suburban family’s doorstep. Inside is a device with a button, which Norma (Cameron Diaz) and Arthur Lewis (James Marsden) soon learn will earn them $1 million if pressed. It will also cause the death of someone they don’t know.

The Lewises take the risk and push the button, plunging themselves into a world filled with zombielike mobs, a rash of bloody noses and one disturbingly deformed messenger (Frank Langella). Mr. Kelly has taken a risk of his own in making the film, and the consequences may well be more real if not so frightening. “The Box,” a Warner Brothers release with a mostly straightforward, linear story, is deliberately calculated to be commercial and, he hopes, keep him viable within the Hollywood studio system. “I have a lot riding on this film,” Mr. Kelly, 34, said over lunch at Greenblatt’s Deli, a Sunset Boulevard staple. “Until I have a theatrical hit, people aren’t going to keep giving me chances.”

It’s a sentiment that’s hard to imagine coming from Mr. Kelly, whose previous movies could never be described as straightforward or studio-friendly. Mr. Kelly, a University of Southern California film school graduate, earned cult status with his first feature, “Donnie Darko,” a 2001 psychodrama about a sleepwalking teenager (Jake Gyllenhaal, then unknown) who receives messages of the pending apocalypse from a man in a giant bunny suit. But six years later a three-hour rough cut of “Southland Tales” — an ambitious, postnuclear mishmash about commercialism, war, homeland security and Los Angeles, among many other things — made its debut at the Cannes Film Festival to a chorus of boos. The slimmer finished product fared little better with domestic critics (the words “fiasco,” “self-indulgent” and “disaster” were common, although Manohla Dargis in The New York Times found it a “funny, audacious, messy and feverishly inspired look at America and its discontents”) or audiences (it took in just $275,000 in the United States).

“It was incredibly painful,” Mr. Kelly said. He conceded that the film was self-indulgent but insisted he had no regrets. “It’s one of those things you can do only once in your career,” Mr. Kelly said. “I’m very proud of the movie.”

But he quickly realized that he needed to change perceptions about himself. His trippy films have made people assume he’s “like Edward Scissorhands living up in some weird castle,” he said, alluding to the Tim Burton-Johnny Depp film. “But that’s certainly not who I am.”

In person Mr. Kelly comes across like a former fraternity guy, his torn jeans and gelled hair complementing a T-shirt that reveals an obsessive weightlifter. “My dream is to be able to have thought-recognition software that, as I’m exercising, will just write the script,” he said.

His Twitter feed (with more than 5,000 followers) has revealed his love of University of Southern California football, beer pong and the Coen brothers’ movie “A Serious Man.” (“Oy vey! This goy is beyond smitten!” he tweeted.)

Everyone interviewed for this article mentioned the dissonance within Mr. Kelly. “A contradiction would imply something that would be understood,” Mr. Gyllenhaal said, “two things that would be a yin and a yang. He’s not that.” Mr. Gyllenhaal then took a moment to formulate an accurate description. “I sometimes feel like he’s out of the mind of John Hughes. He’s like the missing character in ‘The Breakfast Club.’ “

Though “The Box” is intended to be a crowd-drawing thriller, it returns Mr. Kelly to the setting and some of the themes found in “Donnie Darko”: Both are set in upper-middle-class Virginia suburbs (Mr. Kelly grew up in Newport News and Richmond) and pose questions through tales of a traditional family in an unusual circumstance. “The suburbs are emblematic of the life we pretend to enjoy,” he said. “All those houses that look like a gigantic machine just squirted them out. Obviously some people do enjoy that life, others do not, but they all try to pretend to.”

The screenplay is based on a 1971 short story by the sci-fi writer Richard Matheson (“I Am Legend”) called “Button, Button.” (The movie also evokes 1970s conspiracy theory movies like “The Parallax View” and “Three Days of the Condor.”) Mr. Kelly optioned that 11-page tale, which has also been adapted into a 1986 “Twilight Zone” episode, but he added a new layer to its minimal plot.

“I decided to take this gift of a short story and make it about people I care about and respect,” he said. “I’m not interested in telling a story about a couple of selfish jerks who push a button.”

So he adapted details of his parents’ lives. He set the film in 1976 because that’s when his father helped design the camera for the Viking project, which sent a robot to Mars. “I was in awe of my dad’s work,” said Mr. Kelly, who lobbied for a year to be granted the rare privilege of shooting on the Langley campus of NASA.

He mined a more personal aspect of his mother’s life for the film. When she was a teenager, Mr. Kelly’s mother had an X-ray taken of her foot. This normally routine assessment took a bizarre turn when the doctor left the room, accidentally leaving the machine on. Extended radiation exposure left Ms. Kelly in the hospital for months and without a number of her toes. “My mother actually endured and lived through something from a horror film, essentially,” Mr. Kelly said. “One of the reasons I wanted to make this movie was to pay tribute to that experience, pay tribute to her.”

“Richard has really commercial taste,” said the producer of “The Box,” Dan Lin, a former production executive at Warner Brothers, which has a tradition of making mainstream movies with artistic directors, like Spike Jonze’s “Where the Wild Things Are” and Steven Soderbergh’s “Oceans Eleven” series. “He can elevate the material without selling out. He still has his own style.”

Mr. Lin added, “There’s a real grounding in who these characters are as people, and I think actors really respond to that.”

Getting the go-ahead for the movie was helped along immensely by Ms. Diaz, the star of “What Happens in Vegas” and “In Her Shoes,” among others, agreeing to sign on. A close friend of Drew Barrymore, who produced and had a supporting role in “Donnie Darko,” Ms. Diaz was dating Justin Timberlake while he was shooting “Southland Tales,” so she was familiar with Mr. Kelly’s work. “I loved ‘Donnie Darko,’ ” she said. “Richard is an artist; he has such huge ideas.”

And having Ms. Diaz on board helped ground Mr. Kelly. “Cameron would police me,” he recalled. “She would say, ‘Richard, now you need to keep this focused, you need to explain this because this logic doesn’t work.’ ”

“I constantly have these voices — my manager, my agent, my producing partner — to make sure people can follow it, make sure it’s not too long,” Mr. Kelly added. “Make sure that it’s not self-indulgent.” He doesn’t mean that he’s going to water down his ideas, but he’s making sure to get his point across clearly.

“When he tries to pile too many ideas on top of each other — when he can’t explain it himself — that’s when you’ve got him,” said his producing partner, Sean McKittrick, who runs Darko Entertainment, which has made non-Kelly films like the recent comedies “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell” and “World’s Greatest Dad.” “Richard’s greatest strength is his imagination, and sometimes it’s his biggest hurdle.”

Mr. Kelly’s immersion in his work has meant he has often neglected his need for a stable home, opting to crash on friends’ couches for extended periods, as he is now, rather than rent an apartment. “It’s a good thing to be emotionally invested in your work,” Mr. Kelly said, “but I can’t keep doing it to a point where it consumes my entire life anymore.”

Mr. Gyllenhaal has his own take on Mr. Kelly’s willingness to work inside the studio system. “I think what Richard’s saying is, ‘I kind of have to wake up every once in a while, live in reality and not just explore my dreams.’

“I’m amazed by Richard’s courage By how he really believes in something and even when he’s doing something for the studio, he can’t do something not from who he is.”

Mr. Kelly is already deep in preparing for the film he hopes to make next, which he describes as a “post-9/11 reconstruction thriller set in Manhattan in 2014.”

“It’s right from my bone marrow,” he said. “It’s absolutely what I want to do next.” At the same time, he said, it’s quite commercial. “It’s also provocative and risky and very much reliant upon a very big star who could anchor it.” Mr. Kelly won’t reveal more, but he knows that getting backing to make it depends on the success of “The Box.”

“I would like to stay in the studio business,” he said, naming Christopher Nolan, who’s moved from “Memento” to “The Dark Knight,” as a model. “Because having to depend upon a film festival and trying to get a distributor, having acquisition executives hem and haw over this and that — I’ve done it, it’s scary and I just don’t want to do it anymore.”

“Ultimately you can’t beat the studio,” he added. “Maybe Spielberg can because he owns a studio. They’re the bank, so you’ve got to just figure out how to work with it. I’ve learned that the smart way to go about it is to learn how to play ball.”

Entrevista a Hong Sang-soo (Light Sensitive)

By Patrick Z. Mc Gavin

Night and Day, by the great South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo, debuted in the competition at Berlin last year and I thought it an instant classic. It played the New York Film festival last fall, and I was afraid it would disappear.

Hong’s already made another terrific film, Like You Know It All. Fortunately, Night and Day has not gone anywhere. It opens today at the Anthology in New York and is becoming available here through the various distribution platforms of IFC Films.

Hong studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and also spent a year living in Paris in 1991. His rueful and melancholy restoration comedies like Turning Gate, Woman is the Future of Man and Woman on the Beach are among the most beautiful works of the last decade.

His theme is a great one: the emotional and sexual geography staked out between men and women.

His sophisticated comedies of manners cut like a knife, and stick in the mind. Almost all of the director’s protagonists are filmmakers, writers or artists. Night and Day is about the romantic travails of a celebrated painter named Seong-nam (Kim Yeong-ho) who flees to Paris to avoid being arrested on a possession charge. A chance encounter with a former lover initiates an elaborate and dense roundelay among a group of stunningly beautiful and defiantly individualistic women.

The most elusive and captivating is a young art student (Park Eun-hye). She’s put off by the fact he’s married and considerably older. Her mixture of insouciance and vulnerability makes each of their encounters tense and highly suggestive. Their banter, often predicated on formal uses of language, has a wounding precision. Hong evokes attitudes and complex feelings about identity, isolation and assimilation found in the story’s darker vein of death and loss. Like Tale of Cinema, he annotates feeling and desire through a judicious, rigorous use of the zoom.

“I am so unlucky,” a major character says at the film’s crucial scene. The moment crystallizes the power and tenacity of this director’s work, where the seemingly throwaway — the digressive — reveal the sharpest truths. The film’s erotic tangles, built on ideas of duration and disruption, turned off some viewers, though I was mesmerized.

Very few directors, men or women, could transform the sight of a young women’s bare feet jutting from underneath a blanket into such an ecstatically beautiful moment.

I was fortunate to spend some time with Hong in Berlin last year. Here’s the man himself on his art, love and magic.

Light sensitive: I guess on some level it’s entirely appropriate you making a film in Paris, because you’ve been called the director most influenced by New Wave directors, particularly Francois Truffaut and Eric Rohmer.

Hong Sang-soo: The reason I like their work and also Ozu is that they’re exceptional films. I like those French filmmakers, but it’s also somewhat coincidental, people see the similarities and the connections people make between our films, because I already have this inside me.

LS: The title Woman on the Beach, was that a homage to the Jean Renoir film?

Hong: I only found out about that later when somebody mentioned it to me. In Korea there’s an old popular song with the same expression. Originally I had a different title, and I was drinking with the producer one night and I just said, how about this title. Also I like English translations.

LS: Did you ever spend any significant time in Paris?

Hong: Just one year, in 1991, before I settled down in Korea. I wanted to see how people lived there. I was aware of a number of [foreign] artists living in France or coming to France and I just wanted to see what it was like living there. In the beginning I lived in this artist’s house. She had an empty room and then my wife came and she found an apartment. My work worked taking care of children and teaching English. The money she made was just for being a baguette.

LS: What was the inspiration of the story?

Hong: At the very beginning it was a small incident. I was in New York and the hotel did not allow me to smoke inside. So I was outside, and there was a train, I saw the conductor and suddenly I felt so lonely so I called my wife and she was doing something in the supermarket and it was daytime there. I could hear a bit of noise in the supermarket, and I thought it was strange. She felt next to me. I could feel her by talking to her and we are separated by this time continuity. Time is so absolute. It felt strange at the moment. When I started thinking about this film, this incident came up.

LS: Your protagonists are almost invariably artists, filmmakers, writers, and now a painter.

Hong: People ask why are your characters so similar? What I do with them in each picture is different for me. Being an artist or a filmmaker in a society like Korea allows me to do something with the picture; I want to work in a form that is familiar. I don’t want to work in material that I haven’t [got a personal connection to.] Whether it’s the location, the nature of the work, I want to work with things that I have some connection with. When I go wrong, I know I’ll go wrong.

LS: All of your films negotiate this geography of desire. Why is that such an enduring theme?

Hong: Because men are always doing something deep down because of women. Not only men, but women too, they have this strong desire to be loved by somebody they love. Whatever honorable thing he does, he does because he wants to be loved by the woman he loves. Dealing with these kinds of relationships can reveal many things, more than other kinds of subjects because it involves lots of mysticisms, prejudices, lies and all the things that are in these relationships. The strong desire prohibits people from looking at their lives coldly and objectively. All the things are intermingled.

LS: I loved that the movie is almost two and a half hours long. It allowed me to luxuriate in the movie, and get into the rhythm and activities of the characters. Other people I’ve talked complained about the length.

Hong: When I finished shooting, I realized that it’s quite long. When we finished shooting, I knew it was long, but I thought, no problem, I usually cut out about thirty or forty minutes. I thought I was going to do it again. Then one month passed without doing anything. Just going to the editing room and smoking and coming back. I realized I didn’t want to cut, even though some parts are maybe less interesting and some parts there’s the feeling that nothing is happening but I need that part for the film to feel like a diary. I thought I could re-arrange a little bit or even shorten it a bit, but then I gave up again because the plotlines came out very spontaneously. I wrote them very quickly in about seven or ten days, so I decided to leave in there the stuff that was coming out.

LS: The sexual content in your films is sometimes quite open, even explicit. Is that still considered a taboo in your country, especially frontal female nudity?

Hong: Not really anymore. I don’t do nude scenes anymore because I just get bored with it. When I was doing Woman is the Future of Man, I felt very strongly, I don’t want to do this again. So I stopped after that. When I asked actresses to do nude scenes, I felt [uncomfortable] and I said I’m not going to do it anymore.

LS: Your style of working appears much closer to that of a novelist or diarist than a filmmaker?

Hong: Whatever I do the important thing as a filmmaker is what I choose to do each time. I don’t plan out what I’m going to do. The only time in my career as a filmmaker I did was on one of my first films, I wrote down what I wanted to do. After that I didn’t think about that. It just all comes out, whatever I observe, whatever is necessary. I don’t know where all the details come from when I first make my mind, and the detail and structure are all coming from different sources. Usually the structure is coming from some memory.

LS: Do you think of yourself as a visual writer?

Hong: I have a set up, a structure of form or a main incident, and then one by one this piece just comes. They are coming from all over, my memory, things from my past, whatever I feel at that moment, I feel like a magnet, just get a piece, something completely different. I combine them. I don’t visualize them.

LS: How’d you characterize your working methods with your cinematographer?

Hong: I usually ask the cinematographer when I hire him that it’s okay for me to decide on the angle. If he says okay, then all right I can work with him. Somebody else deciding the angle doesn’t make sense. It’s so important. Angle and movement I decide and the rest of it we discuss.

LS: South Korea is a small country, but it has one of the most active and interesting national cinemas, both a popular, genre cinema and a realist tradition that you’re a part of. Is it possible to explain it?

Hong: I don’t usually do this kind of generalization. Koreans were known in the East Asian territories for a long time for being playful; they dance, they drink all night. In all the Chinese history books Koreans were described that way. We have some this temperance. We were very well educated considering our economy. Parents were crazy about letting their sons and daughters go to the university. Everybody was well read and things like that. That’s the foundation. We were oppressed [by the Japanese] for a long time and then we had this dictatorship. The economic development allowed us to make so many films.

LS: What drew you into filmmaking?

Hong: At the beginning it was an accident. Somebody told me why don’t you try directing theater plays as a major. I was nineteen. I thought I could do that, so I prepared for the entrance exam in the theater department. The department also had a filmmaking major. In the theater you gathered around groups all the time and you worked together. I didn’t like that. The filmmakers were moving around on their own, they were free, just roaming around, so that’s why I changed the majors.

It came to me as I changed the major. Filmmaking was something I could work all my life doing something, and always find something curious or interesting, or what I’d call experiments. Before that, I never thought of becoming a filmmaker or anything like that. I realized by becoming a filmmaker I do my experiments and try out different things and find a way to always keep satisfying myself.

Morrissey in hospital after collapse (The Guardian)

from Guardian Unlimited Music by James Orr

Former Smiths frontman in a 'stable condition' after collapse following opening song in Swindon

The former Smiths frontman Morrissey was rushed to hospital tonight after collapsing on stage at the start of a concert.

Witnesses said that just moments after the 50-year-old had finished performing his opening song, the 1983 hit This Charming Man, he fell to the floor and was dragged offstage by worried band members.

Minutes earlier he had arrived on stage and said: "Good evening ... probably."

The singer, whose real name is Steven Patrick Morrissey, was performing at the Oasis Leisure Centre in Swindon, Wiltshire, as part of a world tour when the incident happened at around 9pm.

He was taken by ambulance to Great Western hospital where medics described his condition as stable.

Mark Taylor, 40, who was in the 1,000-strong audience, said: "The stage went dark and he was taken off the stage and then his band then all left the stage. There was a wait of about 25 minutes before one of the stage crew came on and said Morrissey had left the building, and that he was seriously ill.

"Everybody started booing, thinking 'here we go again'. He has a bit of a poor track record for cancelling his concerts."

Morrissey has already cancelled a string of concerts this year due to an "unspecified illness".

In May he cancelled a show at Birmingham's Symphony Hall due to ill health and during February and March, the four opening dates of his tour – all in Florida – were also cancelled, reportedly due to illness too.

A spokesman for the Great Western Ambulance Service said: "A 50-year-old man who was reported to be reported to be suffering from respiratory problems and was unconscious. We sent a paramedic in a doubled-crewed ambulance. When they arrived they found a conscious patient who was not feeling well at all."

A spokesman for the Great Western hospital said: "Morrissey is being reviewed by the medical staff and his condition is stable."

"A Prophet" - Within a closed world (Sight & Sound)

Jacques Audiard talks to Ginette Vincendeau about his follow-up to 'The Beat That My Heart Skipped', prison drama 'A Prophet'

In the media frenzy surrounding the controversial 2009 Cannes festival, Jacques Audiard's Grand Prix for A Prophet (Un prophète) got relatively short shrift, at least on the international scene. In France, though, the film's September release made a big splash, with critics overwhelmingly confirming the Cannes jury's high opinion of the film.

A prison movie, A Prophet charts the rise of inmate Malik (Tahar Rahim) - through a mixture of violence, cunning and old-fashioned education - from illiterate, victimised underdog to powerful gang leader. His fate is linked to Corsican godfather César (Niels Arestrup), who makes him execute a contract, a bloody affair which will haunt Malik in unexpected ways.

With only five features in almost 20 years, Jacques Audiard (the son of celebrated scriptwriter Michel Audiard) has steadily forged a reputation as a strong authorial figure who is not afraid of tackling genre, such as the Resistance film in A Self-made Hero (Un héros très discret, 1996), and the thriller in Read My Lips (Sur mes lèvres, 2001) and The Beat That My Heart Skipped (De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté, 2005). In the past he has worked with high-voltage male stars such as Matthieu Kassovitz, Vincent Cassel and Romain Duris. A Prophet, built on the shoulders of an unknown young actor surrounded by many non-professionals, marks a departure in this respect. But Rahim's charisma and the film's gritty evocation of the prison world make A Prophet every bit as powerful as the earlier films. With it Audiard confirms his unique place in French cinema, while in Rahim a star is born.

How did you develop the script of 'A Prophet'?

There were several things working in parallel, including my desire for realism. Cinema is interesting if it resembles what you see in the street. I understood that I had to change my casting policy and portray people who are rarely represented in French cinema, for instance Arabs and blacks. At the same time, I was following a script by Abdel Raouf Dafri and Nicolas Peufaillit called Le Prophète (The Prophet). But 'the' prophet means Mohammed. There was something heavy and provocative in it, so I changed it to 'a' prophet; there's an irony in it which I don't think gets through.

You used non-professional actors, including real prison inmates.

The cast is very diverse. Tahar Rahim [who plays Malik] is a beginner, though he is outstanding and I never felt his lack of experience. Working with him was remarkable, liberating; he has no past as an actor, no image. There is nothing to fight against - he is just there. Niels Arestrup [César], on the other hand, entirely composed his character. He learned Corsican phonetically and I think that his strictly musical relationship to that language added something to his performance. And then there are many real inmates who brought something extraordinary. I didn't have to explain to them how you enter a courtyard, how you walk along corridors, how you stand alone or in pairs. They knew it all. They even made me change my directing style. Normally you place the camera in relation to the lead actors and organise the background afterwards. I realised this didn't work here - I had to organise the background first and then direct the foreground in relation to it. That was new to me, a real Copernician revolution. I think the realism of the film is there.

Why the fantasy moments in an otherwise realist film?

I visited a few prisons in France and in Switzerland. It was useful, but at one point I realised I had to stop. I didn't want to make a documentary. In the film all is recreated and yet looks real. But I wanted Malik to be more than a criminal. Among other things, adding the ghost of the man he killed gave him interiority very economically. This was interesting both for the psychology of the character and the form of the film. At the same time it brings humour and lightness to such a noir film. It's as if the walls of the cell opened up.

The inmates are Corsicans, Arabs and gypsies, rather than native white French people.

They are all French. Up to a point I think it is insulting to think of a beur [second-generation Arab] as non-French. For me there are conflicts, but they are power relations, not ethnic or racial questions. I could have used Serbs, but the linguistic problems would have been even harder! I simply went for cinematic stereotypes in the same way as American cinema uses Sicilians or Chicanos.

Is there a risk of falling into the stereotype of the Arab as delinquent?

Of course Malik is a delinquent, but he is a good character, he shows great aptitude for learning, he is adaptable, he is brave. Malik is the triumph of intelligence over brute force. I was careful to define him at the outset not as an Arab, but as a vagrant. In the end he does join the Arab group [in prison], and he has a warm relation to his community and culture, but without having a ghetto mentality; he will never be a fanatic.

How do you see your place within contemporary French cinema?

In terms of the film-making process I am an auteur, and I would be very ill at ease in any other system. I would like things to be different, in the sense - and this may be presumptuous - that I would like authors to write for me, to have ideas for me. The French system is not well disposed towards this. A film project in France means a director and a producer, not a scriptwriter and a director.

At home I get annoyed with French cinema, but as soon as I go abroad and see a French film selection, I think, Wow! What variety, what freedom! My place is within this variety.

Does anyone like 3D?, by Roger Ebert

Has it really come to this? I read in Variety, the film industry journal, that ‘Mark Thomas of Elsinore Films is producing a 3-D musical Hamlet targeting the Harry Potter and High School Musical market’. I am not concerned for Hamlet, which has been kneaded into so many preposterous shapes and survived. What horrifies me is the prospect of seeing the film in 3-D. Variety helpfully explains: ‘Hamlet lends itself to a 3-D treatment. The producers hope to include a ghost that hovers in front of the audience’s eyes, cannon fire that flies into the auditorium and a sword fight that appears to happen all around viewers.’ Yes, and no doubt Yorick’s skull thrust into our faces.

The 3-D process is an abomination that has died many deaths. It failed in the 1950s as a novelty, and again in the 1970s as a device to breathe new life into exhausted franchises. It even fizzled as a promising innovation in porno. Somehow, audiences didn’t find it erotic to witness the legs of The Stewardesses extending above them as they zeroed in on the money shot.

Simply put, has anyone ever attended a 2-D movie and thought, ‘If only it were in 3-D’? I doubt it, because 2-D creates a perfectly effective illusion of depth and dimension. When I see Lawrence growing from a dot far across the desert sands, it never occurs to me that I’m watching a 2-D image. When I watch 3-D, however, I’m constantly reminded that it’s in 3-D. Objects approach and recede alarmingly, drawing you out of the actual film.

Animators are among the worst perpetrators. They seem obsessed with a 3-D bungee effect, in which characters such as the Kung Fu Panda spring from far below into the near-foreground, their faces frenzied, and then fall back to earth like Wile E. Coyote. It crystallises much that is wrong with the process. The planes of a 3-D picture are rarely rendered into a seamless progression from foreground to background, as in 2-D, but call attention to themselves. Characters seem more concerned to demonstrate their dimensions than their personalities. And, by its nature, the entire 3-D image must be in focus at all times, depriving cinematographers of the use of focal planes. The process is an annoyance and a distraction.

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"Antichrist", de Lars von Trier (The New York Times)

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: October 23, 2009

Women: intrinsically evil or tragically misunderstood? If this strikes you as a fruitful topic of discussion, then you may wish to see — or perhaps I should say endure — Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist,” a film that has already set off carefully orchestrated frissons of disturbance at film festivals around the world. It starts with a slow-motion, black-and-white sequence, scored to a Handel aria, of graphic sex (with a snippet of hard core thrown in just for fun) and climaxes with two vivid scenes of genital mutilation.

Mr. von Trier has said that making the movie helped him overcome a crippling depression. I’m glad he feels better. He has certainly lost none of the impish, assaultive sensationalism that has made him both a darling and a scapegoat of film critics. But the formal rigor and intellectual brio that made his best films — “Breaking the Waves” and “Dogville” — as hard to dismiss as they were easy to loathe seems to have abandoned him. The scandal of “Antichrist” is not that it is grisly or upsetting but that it is so ponderous, so conceptually thin and so dull.

The story is simple enough, and arises from a precipitating calamity laid out on the very first page of “Melodrama for Dummies”: the death of a child. During the sexual ecstasy of the opening scene, as a nameless couple played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg grapple on nearly every piece of furniture and appliance in their apartment, their son, a toddler, climbs from his crib and makes his way to an open window. He tumbles out, along with his teddy bear, at what seems to be precisely the moment of his mother’s orgasm.

The rest of “Antichrist,” divided into chapters and shot in weird, pulsating, muted digital color by Anthony Dod Mantle (“Slumdog Millionaire”), explores the aftermath of this fatal incident, and expands on its implicit linking of female sexuality and death. The mother is mad with grief and guilt, and Ms. Gainsbourg’s anguished, naked (literally and otherwise) performance is, at least in the film’s first half, its only genuinely harrowing aspect. Following in the footsteps of Emily Watson in “Breaking the Waves,” Bjork in “Dancer in the Dark” and Nicole Kidman in “Dogville,” she allows herself to be pushed and provoked toward brave and extraordinary feats of acting in a dubious cause.

Mr. Dafoe, playing her husband, is less demonstrative. A psychologist of some kind, he decides to take over his wife’s treatment, weaning her off medication and subjecting her to his own methodology, which includes drawing a triangle on a piece of paper. The apex represents the thing she fears most. Is it her husband? Is it nature? Is it the isolated forest cabin they call Eden?

That sinister, sylvan place is where they go to work things out, amid a storm of falling acorns and a riot of metaphors and curious optical effects. “Antichrist” certainly looks and sounds troubling, with landscapes that warp, buckle and undulate and an aural design that turns puffs of wind into satanic murmurs. Occasionally a grotesque animatronic animal — including a talking fox that has already gathered a cult following in cinephile circles — shows up to add an extra touch of Guignol.

Ms. Gainsbourg’s character calls nature “Satan’s church,” one of the film’s many nods in the direction of the horror genre. Another is her research into the history of witchcraft, in particular the murderous suppression of pagan religious practices associated with women in early modern Europe. The fruit of her work is a scrapbook of old woodcuts and paintings titled “Gynocide,” which her husband discovers in Eden’s attic.

Such pseudo-scholarship is of course a hallmark of the modern horror movie, though usually (as in “Paranormal Activity”) it is conducted via Internet search. Mr. Von Trier is in some ways a traditionalist, though his depictions of bodily harm inflicted by homely instruments (pliers, scissors, a fireplace log) are avant-garde enough to startle devotees of the “Saw” franchise. Unlike the makers of that persistently popular festival of pain, he is also a bit of a snob, a filmmaker who undermines his pulpy instincts with high-flown, vaguely political ideas.

The problem is that they are often dumb ideas. There has already been some debate among critics about whether “Antichrist” is grossly misogynistic or slyly feminist, an argument ultimately as fruitless as the question posed by the movie about the nature of women (see above). That talking fox has given the movie a handy catchphrase — “Chaos reigns!” — but a more apt one is delivered by Ms. Gainsbourg among bouts of howling, sobbing and penis smashing: “None of this is any use at all.”

ANTICHRIST

Opens on Friday in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Washington and San Francisco.

Written and directed by Lars von Trier; director of photography, Anthony Dod Mantle; edited by Anders Refn; music by Handel; production designer, Karl Juliusson; produced by Meta Louise Foldager; released by IFC Films. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Willem Dafoe (He), Charlotte Gainsbourg (She) and Storm Acheche Sahlstrom (Nic).

Festival de Mar del Plata: recomendaciones

Algunas películas de Mar del Plata a tener en cuenta (para bien o para mal), además de las ya anunciadas en las tres competencias:

-Lars von Trier (Anticristo)
-Jacques Rivette (36 vues du Pic St-Loup)
-Sam Mendes (Away We Go)
-Costa-Gavras (Eden en el Oeste)
-Ang Lee (Taking Woodstock)
-Jacques Audiard (Un profeta)
-Francois Ozon (Ricky)
-Alain Cavalier (Irene)
-Naomi Kawase (Nanayo)
-Nobuhiro Suwa e Hyppolite Girardot (Yuki & Nina)
-Marc Webb ((500) Días con ella)
-Sophie Bartes (Cold Souls)
-Peter Strickland (Katalin Varga)
-Duncan Jones (Moon) FOTO
-Uprhong Raksasad (Agrarian Utopia)
-Robert Kenner (Food, Inc.)
-Alexander the Last, de Joe Swanberg
-The Exploding Girl, de Bradley Rust Grey
-Unmade Beds, de Alexis Dos Santos
-y Os famosos e os duendes da morte, de Esmir Filho
-L’Enfer d’ Henri-Georges Clouzot, de Serge Bromberg
-Huacho, de Alejandro Fernández Almendra
-La ciudad de la vida y la muerte, de Lu Chuan
-Humpday, de Lynn Shelton
-Louise-Michel, de Gustave de Kervern y Benoit Delépine
-All Tomorrow’s Parties, de Jonathan Caouette
-Buscando a Elliott Smith, de Gil Reyes
-When You’re Strange, de Tom DiCillo
-Accident, de Cheang Pou-Soi
-Anaglyph Tom, de Ken Jacobs
-Between Two Worlds, de Vimukthi Jayasundara
-She, a Chinese, de Xiaolu Guo

"Boogie, el aceitoso", de Gustavo Cova (Clarín, versión extendida)

Boogie no es un personaje convencional del cine animado nacional para toda la familia. Se trata de un asesino a sueldo, sin nada parecido a sentimientos (“todo lo humano me es ajeno” es su frase de cabecera), que no sólo mata a sangre fría por dinero sino que lo ha hecho como militar para los Estados Unidos invadiendo países y aniquilando poblaciones enteras. Además, es un tipo sin muchas virtudes ni zonas amables en su vida personal: es bebedor, misógino (“las mujeres, en la cocina o en la cama”), racista, golpeador, agresivo y rudimentario en todos sus modales.

Al menos en la Argentina –la película se proyectó también en festivales internacionales--, casi todo el mundo debe saber de que se trata de un personaje paródico, de historietas, creado por el genial Roberto Fontanarrosa. Boogie es un virtual catálogo de maldades con quien no se nos pide identificación, sino más bien una mirada irónica, donde sus barbaridades nos causen gracia y no den para aplaudirlas. Si bien esa es una zona de riesgo que tiene el personaje –y con él la película--, Gustavo Cova logra llevarlo a extremos tales de caricaturesca crueldad que es imposible tomárselo en serio.

Ese es uno de los varios méritos que tiene “Boogie, el aceitoso”, un policial negro animado, apto para un público adulto y adolescente, a quien no se le aplicó ningún proceso de “infantilización” a la hora de llevarlo de la historieta al cine. Más bien la opción fue la opuesta: exacerbar aún más su agresividad para hacerla absurda.

En el filme, Boogie va a ser contratado para matar a un testigo clave que hará caer a un gánsgster, testigo que está escondido y celosamente protegido. Pero los mafiosos que responden a “el capo” deciden a último momento contratar a otro hombre –supuestamente más joven y eficaz, Boogie se está volviendo antiguo y obsoleto—porque “el aceitoso” les parece que cobra caro. Pero Boogie, molesto, cumple igual con su tarea y luego intentará pedir con “el testigo” un rescate.

El testigo es una mujer, claro, con la que ya Boogie tenía una historia de maltratos. Pero como el hombre es irresistible para las mujeres pese a su virulencia y machismo, ella tratará de que, en lugar de entregarla, la rescate. Pero el tipo es un duro y no es fácil de convencer, aún cuando para protegerla (o para proteger el dinero que ella le puede proporcionar) deba enfrentar a mafiosos y policías a la vez.

Con esos códigos de cine negro que la colocan en la senda de “La ciudad del pecado”, Cova construye un universo estético que le debe mucho a la historieta de Fontanarrosa. Seca, brutal, pero con momentos cómicos, “Boogie” parece hecha para el público que goza con una estética a la que podemos llamar “tarantinesca”, donde mafiosos y asesinos parecen disfrutar y bromear mientras aniquilan a medio mundo sin piedad.

La película casi nunca da respiros en cuanto a su ritmo, y en ese sentido se puede decir que –más allá de su propulsión a corte rápido y música omnipresente—resulta una enorme mejoría en relación a otros filmes de animación local. Lo mismo puede decirse en cuánto a su estética. Si bien está lejos de llegar a la altura de las producciones hollywoodenses, se trata de un trabajo bastante cuidado en sus detalles y su universo de referencias está muy apoyado en clásicos del cine, desde el policial tipo “Harry, el sucio” a películas de guerra como “Apocalypse Now”, pasando por westerns a lo Sergio Leone.

Otro punto alto es el trabajo de voces. Pablo Echarri y Nancy Dupláa encarnan a Boogie y Marcia (la testigo) y lo hacen en un castellano neutro, “exportable”. Y salen más que bien del paso, sin las habituales dificultades que tienen los actores argentinos para el trabajo de voces de animación en general y del “castellano neutro” en particular. Dupláa, además de bien, está irreconocible con su tono y acento.

El punto más complicado que tuvieron que resolver es el del 3D. “Boogie” no fue hecha de esa manera, sino que se “reconvirtió” al 3D en medio de su proceso de producción. En realidad, más que un 3D es un sistema llamado “2D estereoscópico” que se ve, al ojo humano, de manera similar al de los libros troquelados, con figuras en distintos niveles espaciales dentro del plano, pero como si fueran recortados y bidimensionales. Al principio cuesta acostumbrarse al formato, pero luego queda en claro que resulta una solución bastante apropiada y que remeda más aún al mundo del papel y la historieta en el que nació el personaje. Y esa distancia también sirve para trabajar con un personaje tan, digamos, impresentable. Y poder tenerlo cerca, pero tampoco tanto...

Catálogo del Festival de Mar del Plata

Link

Ya está en la página de internet del festival y aquí va el link directo a que lo bajen. A partir de mañana voy a empezar a desmenuzar un poco la programación. En principio, pinta bastante mejor de lo que me temía... Tal vez mis expectativas eran muy bajas, pero hay bastantes pelis. Chequeenlas.

Boogie Night en Rosario

Curioso esto de viajar a Rosario a ver una función privada de una película. Digamos que se trató de un evento de lanzamiento nacional del filme y todo eso, pero para mí --en el diario ya habíamos escrito una nota de tapa con la peli-- el único motivo era ir a ver la película. Bastante más lejos que Metrovisión, digamos, o la sede de Disney en Vicente López.

Si es algo para hacer una vez al año puede tener su gracia. La cuestión se transforma en una pequeña aventura y además, en este caso, Rosario me encanta. Pero siempre existe un problema: que tanto viaje, micro, coctelito, nota y corrida te termine dejando palmado a la hora de la proyección. Por suerte no me pasó y tal vez sea mérito de la película, que me sorprendió bastante gratamente.

No hay mucho más para contar del viaje porque fue todo muy programadito, como un tour escolar. Llegar al hotel, salir a la conferencia de prensa, hacer notas individuales, ver la película e ir a una cena masiva en el Bar El Cairo que no tuvo nada demasiado relevante más que una chica cantando las canciones más obvias del repertorio de "bandas de casamiento y fiestas varias".

La verdad, prefiero las privadas más o menos cerca de casa, pero si hay una película sobre el Glaciar Perito Moreno, no me niego al traslado para verla allá...

Rosario, por un día

En un curioso e inusual evento, el screening de prensa de la película "Boogie, el aceitoso" será en Rosario, ciudad de Roberto Fontanarrosa. Como me ha tocado en suerte escribir sobre la película, en minutos me estaré marchando para "la Chicago argentina", ciudad que cada día me gusta más. Trataré de seguir conectado desde allí, siempre que el tiempo, las conexiones y esos eventos programados de tour tipo "press junket" me lo permitan...

Y si no, nos vemos a la vuelta!

The Private World of Ingmar Bergman (W Magazine)

For 40 years, Ingmar Bergman lived, worked and found inspiration on the windswept Swedish island of Fårö. Here, for the first time, a view into his deeply personal realm.

By Diane Solway

November 2009

When Ingmar Bergman turned 62, in 1980, his children gathered on Fårö, the remote Baltic island he called home, to perform a play they had written about God and the Devil betting on who would win his soul. His nine offspring (by six women) took on assorted roles, playing their mothers, Bergman himself at various ages, God, the Devil and Death. Rounding out the cast of characters were God’s angels and Bergman’s mistresses, portrayed by his brood’s friends and girlfriends. Death walked around in a black cloak and didn’t say much, while the others read poems they had written. But the question of where Bergman would spend eternity was never settled; instead, the troupe erupted into a dazzling song-and-dance number, making for a decidedly un-Bergman-like finale. “My father loved it,” says his youngest daughter, Linn Ullmann, now 43, recalling the spectacle in the garden at Dämba, an old limestone farmhouse Bergman owned on Fårö. “In fact, we had to do an encore the next day so he could film the whole thing with his handheld camera.”

For Bergman, of course, Fårö provided more than the setting for his home movies. It was his haven, his creative wellspring and a central character in a number of his films. Here he wrote his scripts, filmed several of his groundbreaking works and screened movies twice a day in a converted barn. Unforgiving and elemental, with its rocky beaches and weather-beaten forests of gnarled pine, Fårö epitomized Bergman’s unsparing and unsettled internal world. There’s a sensuality in its hardness that reveals itself only if you look closely: Fårö does its best not to charm you.

When Bergman saw it for the first time, in 1960, while scouting locations, he thought, “This is your landscape, Bergman,” as he recalls in his autobiography. Six years later, after returning to make Persona with Liv Ullmann, he built Hammars, a house on the edge of the sea near the spot where they’d shot the film and fallen in love. From that moment, the windswept island became the stage on which Bergman’s artistic and domestic lives intertwined.

Bergman died on Fårö in 2007 and in his will, written in the Nineties, instructed his heirs to strike the set—to sell off his houses, his cinema and their contents to the highest bidder. “About this I want no emotional hullabaloo,” wrote the director of some of the most psychologically intimate, emotionally harrowing movies ever made. Before the sale, the family agreed to allow his private rooms and favorite vistas to be photographed for publication for the first time, exclusively in W, and several of those closest to him offered to speak about Bergman’s secluded life.

“My father and Fårö was a great love story,” says Linn on an overcast afternoon in July, pointing out the imposing trees he refused to cut back because he wanted to witness the effects of wind and time on them. And yet, rather than celebrate the panorama outside, Bergman contained and framed it, lining his rooms with small windows that allowed only glimpses of forest and sea. Bergman’s hand is everywhere in evidence at Hammars, his single-story gray-brown wooden house whose stone wall appears to have been chiseled from the untamed landscape. Inside, the overall effect is of respectable, ordered domesticity—from the modest modern Swedish furnishings and wood paneling to the carefully cataloged shelves in the library. (Family members were required to record in a notebook the titles of the books they borrowed.)

To the restless Bergman, order and punctuality were paramount virtues. “When you’re as chaotic as I am, you need a very firm structure in your life,” he told close friend Hanns Rodell, a regular summer guest at Dämba. “Because this is a way of keeping me sane.” He loved to open the grandfather clock in the living room to show his children its inner workings. “Life here was very regimented,” recalls Linn, an acclaimed novelist. “The sound of this house was that clock.”

The house also served as a kind of diary. Bergman often wrote on the walls and furniture, scribbling the dates and times of radio programs he wanted to listen to or phone calls he was to make. On the back of his workroom door, he and Liv made drawings daily about their feelings for each other. Red hearts and faces meant good days; black O’s, sometimes a string of them, signaled darker times. At the end of one line, Liv drew a simple heart, with the words “Liv leaves.” The pair lived together (though never married) for three years with their daughter, Linn, and made two films here, but Bergman’s jealous rages proved stifling. (In his memoir, Bergman writes of Liv’s departure, “One protagonist had moved on, and I was left on the set.”)

Though the next year, Bergman married Ingrid von Rosen—his fifth and final wife—he never removed his and Liv’s love diary. “So that it wouldn’t bleach in the sun and with the years, Ingmar sometimes went and freshened it up,” recalls Liv, whose creative alliance with Bergman lasted 40 years. “He would never change the door. And it meant a lot to me that it was in his workroom and about our life together.”

Unlike Bergman’s previous wives and partners, Ingrid was not involved in the arts and dedicated herself to managing his life. “She was incredible because she lived for all that Ingmar needed and wanted and dreamed about,” says his fourth wife and longtime musical collaborator, Käbi Laretei, who regularly stayed at Dämba during the summer months. The no-nonsense Ingrid not only had his dinner ready every night at six, arranged his phone calls, typed his manuscripts and paid out the alimony checks, she kept the peace in the family—all of the families—even when it meant hosting her husband’s children, ex-wives and mistresses.

Ingrid had left her own four children when she married Bergman, but during the summers, her daughter Maria often came to stay with them on Fårö, as did Linn and her older half brother, Daniel Bergman, his son by Laretei. It was at the breakfast table one morning that Linn, then about five or six, first learned that she had half siblings. “Why are you calling my daddy ‘Daddy’?” she asked Daniel, who was then about 10. “My father’s explanation,” she recalls, “was that our mothers were such fine ladies that they didn’t bother to explain that there had been other women. They left that to him. My father found it amusing. There was very little that was ‘oh so traumatic’ or ‘oh so terrible.’ Things quickly became anecdotes and stories.” (Maria von Rosen, meanwhile, was 22 before Bergman revealed to her that he, and not Ingrid’s ex-husband, was her father.)

Bergman and Ingrid spent April through October on Fårö, which they reached by private plane from Stockholm, where they wintered. Life on the island revolved around his rigid schedule: breakfast at 7 a.m., a walk in the woods, work in the morning, lunch at 1 p.m. sharp, back to work. Then came the “silent hour,” from 4 to 5 p.m., when the children had to keep quiet while he napped, which was followed by dinner preparations, when they’d be sent outdoors to collect the wild strawberries that grew around Skrivstugan, Bergman’s isolated writer’s hut near the beach seen in Persona.

The centerpieces of the day were the movies they’d watch together, first in his workroom and then, beginning in 1975, in his private screening room, a once derelict barn he’d converted briefly into a film studio to make Scenes From a Marriage, his searing 1973 film about the disintegration of a seemingly perfect union. The cinema, a 10-minute drive from Hammars, stood next to the Dämba house, also used for Scenes, and was the site Bergman chose for the world premiere of his film of The Magic Flute (1975).

The cinema was sacred ground. Screenings began promptly at 3 p.m. (for which the silent hour was scrapped), and at 8 p.m. Bergman would sit in one of the 15 tufted chairs, prop his feet on his footstool and raise his index finger to signal to the projectionist that it was time to run the film. Afterward, he and his guests would sit on the bench outside and discuss what they’d seen. Linn once watched a four-hour German epic about lumber. Visitors, even family, she recalls, had to prove themselves worthy to be invited to join his cinema group. Though Bergman rarely showed his own movies, he once screened the psychologically complex Persona for her. “Some people don’t get it. Do you?” he asked the 11-year-old. “Yes, I get it,” she replied.

It was at Ingrid’s urging that Bergman brought all of his children together for the first time, for his 60th birthday, on Fårö in 1978, and the gathering quickly became a tradition. “He was so nervous that until the last moment, he said he wanted to cancel it,” recalls Laretei. “Many of them hadn’t met before.” By then, four of his children, all with second wife Ellen Lundström, a former dancer, had careers in the arts: Eva and Jan were theater directors, and Anna and Mats both actors who later appeared in Fanny and Alexander, as did Laretei. (Bergman wanted Liv Ullmann to play the mother and Linn the eldest sister, but Liv turned him down.) Though an absentee father for much of their lives, Bergman began to have more contact. Still, he didn’t go in for socializing, and even though Laretei shared his birthday and celebrated with a dinner for all his visitors every year at Dämba, Bergman and Ingrid would stop by later in the evening, after it was over.

The only place he would gather his brood was in his screening room. “Ingmar didn’t like spontaneous meetings with his children,” recalls Rodell, who was also Laretei’s accompanist, “but at the cinema, there was always something to talk about, and you met in some kind of structure. He liked that. Everyone lived in their own house, a little bit apart from one another, and then we met at specific hours.” As Rodell’s partner, Benny Marcel, another close friend of Bergman’s, saw it, “getting quality time with their father wasn’t easy. So on a fantastic afternoon when the sun was shining, they had to sit in a dark cinema to meet with him.”

But when they did get time with him, he was accessible, relating easily to their own children, for whom he’d concoct frightening tales about the so-called witch’s hut that stood in the forest next to his house. “It’s good for kids to be scared by stories,” he’d say. He once organized a special screening “just for the boys” when Linn’s then 10-year-old son and two other boys were visiting Fårö. The film was Pearl Harbor, and Bergman insisted on fast-forwarding past the sex scenes to focus on the action.

For a filmmaker whose subject was “the soul’s battlefield,” as Woody Allen once put it, Bergman had surprisingly populist tastes. He relished long gossipy telephone chats and was as likely to watch Fellini’s Amarcord as The Godfather, Pulp Fiction or the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera. Screening Jurassic Park one day, he marveled at Hollywood ingenuity. “Those Americans know how to put on the pants!” he said.

They also knew how to make the television shows he liked. Bergman was a fan of the Muppets, particularly the out-of-control drummer, Animal, and rarely missed an episode of Sex and the City. “The women are beautiful, and they talk dirty,” he told Linn. “Do you talk that way with your girlfriends?”

The ways of women, of course, fascinated Bergman, who in more than 50 films probed the female psyche to a degree matched by few of his peers. He often used Liv as an alter ego, and his mother, notes Linn, “is a character in nearly all his films.” Despite having left many of his wives and mistresses for new loves, he was “fantastic at keeping up a good relationship” after the romance ended, says Laretei, a concert pianist who inspired the character played by actress Ingrid Bergman (no relation) in Autumn Sonata (1978). “The great charm he had was that he was really, truly interested in you when you talked to him.”

For his 70th birthday Bergman invited several of his exes to Fårö; his guest list included Liv, Laretei and former leading lady Bibi Andersson. According to Linn, who was there, “These are women who know how to go out onstage and be fabulous. And they are fabulous. There was no bad acting. My father hated bad acting.”

Their collaborations with Bergman connected them. “He liked to surround himself with very strong women,” she adds. “Yes, he was a genius, but he couldn’t have done it without the women. He was their muse, but they were his, too.”

After Ingrid died, Bergman began making regular visits to Fårö’s church. (A black X over the year 1995 marks her passing on his workroom door.) The son of a strict Lutheran minister, he was a self-professed agnostic who had long grappled with his doubt onscreen. But he wanted to believe he would see Ingrid again and, at Hammars, added the monastic, wood-paneled “Ingrid Room,” furnished with a simple cot, where he would watch the sunrise. On Saturdays he would go to church to listen to the bells. One evening, however, the bell ringer failed to show on time. Furious after waiting five minutes, Bergman charged up the steep belfry to ring the bells himself and then chewed out the minister for the lapse. When the church was later scouting for the vicar’s replacement, the departing one advised his employers to write in the ad, “New minister needed. Ingmar Bergman will be the bell ringer.”

Without Ingrid to anchor him, “work became his savior,” notes Ingrid Dahlberg, a longtime colleague who runs the Ingmar Bergman Foundation, created by the director in 2002 to house his personal archives, including his manuscripts. He penned two screenplays, both directed by Liv Ullmann: Private Confessions (1996), about his parents’ troubled marriage, and Faithless (2000), about the devastating effects of an affair, drawn from his own life and shot in part on Fårö. He also returned to directing after a 20-year absence, reuniting Liv and his best friend, Erland Josephson, in the austere Saraband (2003). The pair reprised the roles they played in Scenes From a Marriage. The sequel picks up on the divorced couple 30 years later, when the wife, Marianne, visits her former husband, Johan, at his summer home to see what has come of his life. Bergman hung the Saraband poster, showing the two stars, across from his bed.

By then he had emptied his Stockholm apartment and moved full-time to Fårö, which he’d depicted in two documentaries on the island and its people without saying much about his own life there. Still, locals had come to regard him as a Fårögubbe, an old Fårö guy, someone who didn’t leave the island. Which he didn’t. Tourists trying to find him would be pointed in the wrong direction. Since his cataracts now made driving to his cinema difficult, Bergman talked of traveling there by railcar on tracks he would install and even of building a new cinema next to his house.

The demons he wrestled with in his work still visited him, though he did his best to keep them at bay. “Talk to them, because they hate to be confronted,” he’d advise. “Turn on the light and say, ‘Thank you very much for your performance; that was very good. I appreciate you coming here.’” When dark thoughts awakened him at night, he jotted them down on his bedside table. Seen together, his notes read as a kind of haiku of his fears. “Such terrible dreams these nights, no reconciliation,” “erotic, fiasco, the conflict,” “I’m successful at my career and I’m still sleepless,” “I sense Ingrid’s presence,” “afraid, afraid, afraid.”

Bergman died two weeks after his 89th birthday. He was buried in the secluded plot he had chosen in the local church cemetery and had arranged for Ingrid’s remains to be moved next to his. He had planned his funeral down to the red flowers on his pine casket and was pleased that the minister he’d picked to lead his service was a woman with cascading auburn hair. “To his dying day,” says Linn, “he was charmed by women.”

Negotiations on the sale of Bergman’s Fårö properties began this past May. In September, following the deadline for bids to be sent to Christie’s Great Estates division, Bergman’s heirs were still considering a number of offers and were un-decided about whether to sell the property as one package, valued at about $4 million, or in separate parcels. One hope, advanced by Linn and a group led by Liv, Bergman’s foundation, and assorted local and state cultural agencies, was that it might be purchased for use as a retreat for artists and scholars. (Though at press time they had yet to fund this idea, there were some promising leads.) Bergman also stipulated that his children could take just one of his personal items each, not to exceed $740 in value. The rest—including his writing desk, his night table, his grandfather clock and the magic lantern from his childhood that inspired him to make movies—were to be sold at auction by Bukowskis in Stockholm on September 28. (He had sold the rights to his films during his lifetime.)

A few weeks before he died, Bergman left Hammars for Dämba one last time. He was wheelchair-bound by then and in frail health, so it took some effort to lift him up the stairs to the music room, where Laretei, elegantly turned out, was waiting to play his favorite Brahms waltzes on one of the two grand pianos

he’d installed for her years earlier. They had grown closer following Ingrid’s death, after Bergman called her out of the blue one night to say, “I don’t want to disturb you, but will you play for me?” Their “Sunday evenings at Dämba,” as he called them, soon became a weekly event. “Sometimes we’d close the door and talk about our life together, and our conversations became more and more frank and honest,” recalls Laretei, who was then 84. On this night, however, they were joined by Linn; her husband, writer Niels Fredrik Dahl; Rodell; and Marcel. After Laretei had finished playing, she looked over and saw that Bergman was asleep. He’d drifted in and out, he told her. “He said it was the best sleep he’d had for months,” she says, “because he was in the music.”

“Thank you,” he added. “Now it’s time for Bergman to go home.”

Lady and Bird – La Ballade of Lady and Bird (live) (2009)

Link

Karen Ann and Bardi return with La Ballade of Lady and Bird (EMI France), a collection of live performance recorded last year with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. Combining new songs, tracks from the debut and versions taken from the duo’s individual works, La Ballade is grand in scope and lushly orchestrated but also a surprisingly intimate affair. “Generally we think “live albums” are boring and give you a bad version of the originals,” say L+B. “With this record we are really adding to the originals and giving something more. Here we had over 90 musicians on stage so we have the power to keep it epic and sometimes add more to the songs than on the originals.”