This is not an easy film; it's obscure, relatively unknown, and practically impenetrable at first glance. Director Rubén Gámez would go on to make only one more film after this one, and, after seeing this odd, surrealist, confounding opera prima, some may find this fact to be a blessing upon mankind. But I would disagree.
La Formula Secreta is fascinating. It confuses, angers, frustrates, and delights, usually during the same frame. It recalls both the dreamscapes of An Andalusian Dog, and the montage techniques of Berlin: Symphony of a Great City. It is virtually wordless, save for a poem by author Juan Rulfo, and some other smatterings of cryptic narration here and there. There's no story to speak of, and even the individual fragments don't appear to make much sense, which differentiates this movie from something like Tarkovsky's The Mirror, in which the unifying plot may be murky, but the separate fragments are easy-to-follow.
Consider the first scene in the movie; the camera's doing circles around the Zócalo, and on the ground, we see the shadow of a bird - which, I might add, is not exactly convincing. So what does this image mean? Perhaps it has something to do with flying, and being free. But this particular bird keeps doing circles very close to the ground, never really taking off. Is the point, then, to show this animal as trapped, unable to leave its place?
The movie then goes on to portray the lives of several people who are embroiled by their surroundings and/or lifestyles. This suggests that The Secret Formula is about being chained to a state of misery, like the bird that can't rise into the air. Certainly, the next few segments seem to revolve around this theme.
We see a man assembling bags atop a truck. He finds a woman on the ground, and drags her to the truck too. Then he jumps on top of the bags himself, besides the woman. The truck starts going through the freeway. The woman wakes up, and in a matter of seconds, the man and the woman are kissing. Irreverent randomness? Or is this the story of a man escaping his job in search of eternal love?
Then the farmers come in. One of them stands close to the camera, but the camera tries to look away, and pans to the right, and then to the left. But the man, time and again, stubbornly side-steps into the frame again. He will not be ignored. We will hear his plight. The farmers are tired, and they are dying. They lie in piles amidst the crevices of undulating dunes.
And then the film jumps to a schoolyard, and then to a slaughterhouse, and then to the city streets, where a cowboy ropes in a pedestrian as if he was livestock. This is one of several instances in which the film asks us to consider how we would react if humans were treated as cruelly as animals. In an earlier scene, a boy first carries a skinned cow across his back, and then a woman, and then a man. Gámez is playing with "What If" questions here. Like Planet of the Apes, which had humans as the prey of totalitarian apes, this film likewise presents us with a scenario (or really several scenarios) in which we suffer the same fate that we accord to the "lesser species" of the world.
The film ends with a long list of American companies, which appears to be a statement about capitalism; an implication strengthened by the concurrent visual motif that appears throughout the film: the flashed silhouette of a Coca-Cola Bottle. In fact, one of the original titles for this movie was Coca-Cola en la Sangre (Coca-Cola in the Blood), a tid-bit which only reinforces the anti-consumerist undercurrents.
But despite all these varied themes, what one enjoys the most about The Secret Formula, is that it is refreshingly itself. It's a completely different proposition from regular cinema; a proposition which certainly has antecedents (Buñuel, for instance), but which is original nevertheless.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Applause for Roger Deakins
I think we're living in the "good-cinema times" again.
Great movies are being released. Not just acceptable movies, which fill some sort of yearly quota, and are recognized by critics and audiences merely for rising above some low standard of mediocrity. No; rather, what we're getting are ambitious movies, borderline-visionary movies, works which strive to be remembered for more than six months. One gets the idea that, perhaps, directors are finally trying to measure up to their forefathers of the 1960's and 1970's. Finally, we're getting epoch-making films.
Behind two of these such films is Roger Deakins, a cinematographer who has previously lent his art to movies like Sid and Nancy, The Village, A Beautiful Mind, and The Man Who Wasn't There. Not all of these, granted, are superb. But, alas, he's not in charge of making them good; he just has to make them look good. And he's rather successful on that end.
In my opinion, however, it's this year that's he's done his best work. Not only are The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and No Country for Old Men, the best films, in general, that's he's ever been involved in; they are also, probably, the most gorgeous ones in his career as well.
Jesse James takes place in the fields, and in the swaying grass and grain of the Old West. No Country is more about the desert of Texas, and the arid expanses of the Mexican-American border. Occasionally, we venture into the nighttime streets of uneventful towns.
In both cases, what we get, visually, are panoramic, natural vistas, and characters who are not so much consumed by their surroundings, as they are fused into it. This is different from, say, Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala, where the Siberian Wilderness devours those who step into it. Through Deakins's lens, nature is not a violent force, but something more gentle. What we remember, from Deakins's scenes, is the caress of wind; the white specks of snow hitting Brad Pitt in the face and the distant shadow of a lumbering cloud crawling to the horizon.
When night arrives, Deakins inundates the frame with deep blacks and streaks of light, yellow and white. There is total darkness, and there are also hints of brightness. The streetlights filter through the open space where the key-hole should be; the candle-light shines inside a wooden house; the moon light illuminates the hill or the tree-lined path covered in snow. In a way, it's no wonder this is the same cinematographer who provided such striking black-and-white images for The Man Who Wasn't There; this is a man who loves his shadows. He makes you feel the dark; you can still see enough to make out where the characters are supposed to be standing, but you never see so much that you can possibly forget that it's after hours.
As for the daylight sequences, there is a certain glow to Deakins's visuals. His canvas seems covered in that pale, weak sunlight that arrives at six in the afternoon on a summer day, an hour before sunset. It's this glow, this muted lighting present throughout Jesse James and No Country, that gives each film its distinct melancholic aroma. And that's fitting. Because these are incessantly melancholy films.
Great movies are being released. Not just acceptable movies, which fill some sort of yearly quota, and are recognized by critics and audiences merely for rising above some low standard of mediocrity. No; rather, what we're getting are ambitious movies, borderline-visionary movies, works which strive to be remembered for more than six months. One gets the idea that, perhaps, directors are finally trying to measure up to their forefathers of the 1960's and 1970's. Finally, we're getting epoch-making films.
Behind two of these such films is Roger Deakins, a cinematographer who has previously lent his art to movies like Sid and Nancy, The Village, A Beautiful Mind, and The Man Who Wasn't There. Not all of these, granted, are superb. But, alas, he's not in charge of making them good; he just has to make them look good. And he's rather successful on that end.
In my opinion, however, it's this year that's he's done his best work. Not only are The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and No Country for Old Men, the best films, in general, that's he's ever been involved in; they are also, probably, the most gorgeous ones in his career as well.
Jesse James takes place in the fields, and in the swaying grass and grain of the Old West. No Country is more about the desert of Texas, and the arid expanses of the Mexican-American border. Occasionally, we venture into the nighttime streets of uneventful towns.
In both cases, what we get, visually, are panoramic, natural vistas, and characters who are not so much consumed by their surroundings, as they are fused into it. This is different from, say, Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala, where the Siberian Wilderness devours those who step into it. Through Deakins's lens, nature is not a violent force, but something more gentle. What we remember, from Deakins's scenes, is the caress of wind; the white specks of snow hitting Brad Pitt in the face and the distant shadow of a lumbering cloud crawling to the horizon.
When night arrives, Deakins inundates the frame with deep blacks and streaks of light, yellow and white. There is total darkness, and there are also hints of brightness. The streetlights filter through the open space where the key-hole should be; the candle-light shines inside a wooden house; the moon light illuminates the hill or the tree-lined path covered in snow. In a way, it's no wonder this is the same cinematographer who provided such striking black-and-white images for The Man Who Wasn't There; this is a man who loves his shadows. He makes you feel the dark; you can still see enough to make out where the characters are supposed to be standing, but you never see so much that you can possibly forget that it's after hours.
As for the daylight sequences, there is a certain glow to Deakins's visuals. His canvas seems covered in that pale, weak sunlight that arrives at six in the afternoon on a summer day, an hour before sunset. It's this glow, this muted lighting present throughout Jesse James and No Country, that gives each film its distinct melancholic aroma. And that's fitting. Because these are incessantly melancholy films.
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