Movies: Hugo, A Separation, The Artist

Braving the blistering cold down in the 20’s, I went out and saw two movies today. At AMC Loews Lincoln Square I viewed Martin Scorsese’s Hugo 3D. In view of this director’s earlier and even more recent films, Hugo is a gentle film without the intense emotional turmoil that was often his filmic hallmark. Essentially, it is his rumination on the origin of the cinema, the art to which he is deeply devoted, and, more specifically, a loving tribute to Georges Méliès (1861-1938), magician and the inventor of the narrative film, best remembered for A Trip to the Moon (1902), for which he exploited trick photography to magical effects. And, Scorsese shows himself a magician; he transports us into the world of fantasy imbedded in the eponymous child hero’s world of reality, and he uses the 3-D effectively toward this end. Hugo, an orphan, lives deep in the walls of the Montparnasse train station which shelter the huge mechanical contraptions that regulate the station’s clocks, and his single-minded pursuit of his father’s secret leads to the bitter old man tending a toy stall who turns out to be Méliès himself, played by Ben Kingsley looking deceptively like the filmmaker. Scorsese, in fact, sees the whole station as well as the city of Paris in 1920s and the life therein as a clockwork mechanism like that of the automaton, Hugo’s only inheritance from his father. The film takes liberty with chronology and geography. The runaway train that sped through the Gare Montparnasse and stopped hanging on its facade, of which a photograph exists, was a real event but of 1895; and Méliès was impoverished in 1920’s and it was not until after he was “rediscovered” late in the decade that he was provided with a comfortable retirement home, and that was in Orly. But this film is a fantasy, not history; still, it is infinitely fascinating, a special delight to the film buffs and historians among us.

P.S. Scorsese’s use of the 3D, to put it concisely, concerns space rather than motion. He eschews characters and objects that rush out toward the viewer explosively. Instead, he creates the effect of encompassing space (with the fluttering snow flakes that blow into the auditorium, for example, and Méliès’s sketches that fly off from the box that falls from the hands of Isabelle, the effect which accounts for our sense of being in the room) or, else, of clarifying the sense the narrowly confined space of the walled clock mechanism where Hugo lives. In the scenes of the station concourse he creates the credible impression that we are in the midst of the jostling crowd. I think his use of the 3D shows the understanding akin to that of the filmmakers known for the first creative adoption of the depth-of-field (or deep-focus) shots: William Wyler (with the cinematographer Gregg Toland) and Orson Welles. Scorsese creates an image of depth with both the near and the far in focus.

A Separation is a new film from Iran written and directed by Asghar Farhadi, is a moving story of a wife who seeks separation from her husband for the sake of their daughter’s education, which is denied at the court because he refuses to move from Teheran for the sake of his father suffering from Alzheimers, but the well-intentioned effort, both hers and his, leads to an expanding series of conflicts and clashes in all directions. I have not seen any of his films before this one. The story is well written, seamless in continuity and suspense and engaging as well as touching; and the theme is universal in interest, if also a glimpse into the contemporary urban life in Teheran is refreshing. But the very special beauty of this film is the craftsmanlike weaving of mundane or otherwise predictable events; the way it edits together bits of shots into a coherent but continuous series of events is reminiscent, even if the analogy is trite, of the Persian tapestry, or, even more in the narrative and stylistic precision, the Persian miniature, like the Shahnameh, in which the minutiae are as weighty as the large organizing forms and force us to read in paced sequence of small parts to get the sense of the whole. This is in striking and refreshing contrast to the grossly generalized and often unrealistically histrionic narration in many of the films of recent decades. God is, indeed, in the details. But, curiously, so is the indeterminacy of moral truth. We learn, living vicariously the life of the characters in the film, that no statement purported to be true is free of smaller elements which are not quite true or untrue, as no pictorial or filmic detail is ever complete in what it shows.

The Artist is by Michel Hazanavicius from Belgium, who also wrote and directed the film. I saw it three weeks ago. The story which describes the end of Hollywood’s Silent Era, involving its star George Valentin, a composite of Valentino and John Gilbert, and his young flapper partner Peppy Miller who rides the wave of the talkies to a great success, is told ingeniously not only mimicking the typical silent melodrama in the narrative of the hero's descent into poverty and attempted suicide but also realizing it nostalgically as a black-and-white silent feature, deliciously mawkish meta-cinematically, in both respect. I say meta-cinematically because the film does not attempt to recreate the movie in the silent era but rather comments on it as perceived by those who remember it as a myth rather than as a real experience in its time. It is another film that delights us film buffs and historians alike.