Tetro

As overstated as Francis Ford Coppola's fall from grace may be, there's no denying that he never hit the same heights as his series of '70s films, in which he made four films, all four of which were masterpieces. It seemed as if, like all other filmmakers, Coppola himself couldn't top The Godfather or Apocalypse Now, and only brief flashes of inspiration -- Tucker, bits of Rumble Fish and Dracula, which I seriously and unfairly underrated and will soon revise -- pointed toward the genius that was. After spending a decade at his vineyard watching his daughter carve out a sizable amount of respect for herself, however, Coppola has reemerged, and the titan of New Hollywood became the unlikeliest of things: an independent. Youth Without Youth, a twisty, hugely ambitious feature, packed as many different types of movie -- time travel, WWII romance, philosophical meditation -- about reversed aging as David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Coppola did so with a fraction of the budget.

Taken with his latest feature, Tetro, Coppola's comeback places a particular focus on the actual beauty and meaning of creation, that is, the art of art. Youth Without Youth, a film about a man miraculously aged backwards and allowed a second chance at youth with the wisdom of an aged brain, could easily be a commentary on how digital photography, decreased actor salaries and an increasing ability to work outside the major studio system and still have a few million dollars to work with have given the director a second lease on artistic life.

Tetro takes this one step further. Semi-autobiographical in its story of an Italian-American family of gifted artists, Tetro is infused with the history of filmmaking in the same way that his Dracula was infused with the history of, well, damn near all of Teutonic artforms. Containing clips and extrapolated reinterpretations of Michael Powell's The Tales of Hoffmann and The Red Shoes, Coppola's latest is appropriately operatic, and bizarrely melodramatic in the Almodóvar tradition. Its tale of family rivalry and scorn will set tongues wagging over which character represents which celebrity in the fertile family tree of the Coppolas, but the structure here lends itself to something more universal, not so much impersonal as overseeing.

The film's title refers to one Angelo Tetrocini (Vincent Gallo), who takes on an abbreviation of his surname as he hides out in Buenos Aires suffering from writer's block. His much-younger brother, Benjamin (Aiden Ehrenreich) comes looking for him, but Tetro makes it immediately clear that, though his feud with his family never extended to his brother, his mere presence reminds him of what he left. Bennie, who also left military school to defy their father, works on a cruise ship so he can still wear an approximation of a naval uniform, and he uses his week-long furlough in Argentina to spend time with his brother, who lets him stay only at the urging of Tetro's girlfriend, Miranda (Maribel Verdú).

Bennie, virginal and confused in a country full of people who speak an unfamiliar language, has all the more reason to hang on his brother while there, desperately trying to coax an explanation for why he never came back for the boy. It's clear that Tetro's resentment does not extend to Bennie, who's so similar to his older brother that the eldest snaps, "Don't do me, do you. I'll be me" when Bennie sarcastically refuses to answer questions to prove how irritating the silent treatment is. The last thing Tetro wants to be is a role model, though it's surprising that even his fresh-faced kid brother could do so. Gallo pours his reptilian ego into the role, a failed artist who holds onto his failure as if it had become his art, too proud to release it. He forbids Bennie from telling Miranda about their father and looks keen to send his brother back to America as soon as possible.

But Bennie stays, and his quest to dig up what drove his brother away and to uncover his own hidden past lead Coppola through a range of daring artistic devices. Shot mostly in high-contrast, digital black-and-white, Tetro lives and dies by the precise framing by the director and his cinematographer, Mihai Malaimare Jr., who also contributed to the beautiful compositions of Coppola's previous feature. The chiaroscuro mise-en-scène in Tetro is picturesque and provocative, not just emotionally but artistically: Tetro moves a mirror into place in his flat and the reflective effects allow for compounded compositions. When Bennie finally spills the beans about their father, a famous composer, to Miranda, the director cuts to Tetro frozen at the top of the stairs eavesdropping, shooting in deep focus to capture the stairs stretching behind and below the man in Expressionistic suggestion. The influence of the Germans is only exacerbated as the scene wears on and Tetro shouts down his brother as the camera remains on Bennie's face as the shadow of his brother bears down on him like Count Orlock.

When combined with the open quotation and literal presentation of Michael Powell's movies, the influence of Expressionism on Tetro opens up the true heart of the picture. Consider the outright usage of footage from Hoffmann: that was Powell's attempt to bring opera into the cinematic medium in a way that could only exist in that medium (much as The Red Shoes did for ballet). Coppola's features have always been operatic, especially his treasured Godfather series, but even his '80s youth movies have an unabashed melodrama, if the chief influence there -- making the logical step backwards in age and maturity -- is the musical and not opera. Here, as with Youth Without Youth, Coppola utilizes the broad emotions and half-cooked plot of the story to drive larger statements about art.

Tetro fled his father for being controlling and egomaniacal, insisting to both his sons, "There's only room for one genius in this family." The tortured son plans to write a play about his abusive childhood, but he stalls in Buenos Aires, content to live in his failure and refusing to work on his project. And when Bennie discovers his brother's manuscripts and sets out to write an ending for the work, his attempt to finish his brother's play seems less a validation of art as a means to link people than simply the latest spiral in the cycle of appropriation and plagiarism in the family (their father Carlo having achieved stardom by ripping off his older brother).

As in The Red Shoes, the characters of Tetro define worth through artistic talents -- the composing father, the writing sons, the singing first wife and dancing second -- but they do not find much pleasure in them. Wünderkinds battle it out for supremacy while the older generations rot in the wake of their own power struggles. Amusingly, the Tetrocini family resembles a liberal arts version of the Corleones, waging an internal war in which soldiers are decorated with grants and caporegimes win Pulitzers. The mediating voice in this conflict is the critic, personified by a garishly self-absorbed woman known only as "Alone," the biggest critic in South America. Alone has constructed a warped empire of half-analytical, half-gossipy tabloids, and her carriage and fashion suggests what Anna Wintour might be like if she insisted that Vanity Fair promoted "serious" criticism without sacrificing its glitzy side. Tetro seeks her validation so that he can throw it in Carlo's face, and Coppola has a grand time sending up the academics who so dearly loved him in the '70s before treating him like a leper and forcing him into a 10-year hiatus.

All of this makes for a melodrama that recalls, of all people, Pedro Almodóvar -- Carmen Maura, who plays Alone, is one of the Spanish director's regulars. Among the artistic flourishes in the film are a drag/striptease version of Faust that Tetro ruins by heckling. And if anyone still thinks that this is a gritty look at a broken family, lines like "Do you know what love is in our family? It's a stab in the heart" should adjust one's thinking to the proper perspective. In Gallo, Coppola has a deliciously aloof figure who seems most at home when he's at his most uncomfortable; when Bennie sustains an injury and winds up in the hospital, Gallo believably sells a joking moment where he slyly insists that he's only visiting his brother because they shared the same hospital room. Verdú is, of course, gorgeous and radiates grace, the only party who can stand outside the action and attempt to salve all the opened wounds.

The true find, however, is Ehrenreich. Looking like a young Leonardo DiCaprio, Ehrenreich with his first major role also proves that he can tap into the same well of simmering, brooding talent that the older DiCaprio now exhibits regularly. I wonder if Coppola saw the young man this way, too, placing him in a cruise ship uniform at the start to play on Ehrenreich's heartthrob looks by way of a vague Titanic reference before scuttling him away from the ship and letting his chops take over. Some fault the film for not being emotionally plausible or resonant, which misses the point but is an understandable error when Ehrenreich's mere presence makes one invest in him.

Enamored as the camera is with Ehrenreich, however, Coppola never loses focus, even if the film has a broad thematic makeup. Tetro opens suddenly on an extreme close-up of a light bulb humming as a moth flutters about and bumps into the lamp, and bright lights routinely hypnotize both brothers. When they head to Alone's festival in Patagonia, the light reflecting off the mountains resembles the flashes of adoring cameras, and Tetro stares at this sight with such intensity that an epileptic fit looks imminent. Bennie, too, is drawn to bright lights as he digs deeper into his family history, and thankfully Tetro snaps out of his own fixation in time to help his brother. "You can't look at the light," he tells Bennie, and in that moment Coppola takes a unique approach to art. Most films present the light as the escape from the horrors of life, the filter that allows us to confront reality; for the director just now getting back to work, focusing too intently on the spotlight or the beam of a film projector simply blinds us. With a vision like that, Coppola might yet prove to be a fresh, emerging talent of 70.

Pan's Labyrinth

[Warning -- contains spoilers]

Guillermo Del Toro has always been fascinated with Gothic fantasy, both the Victorian romance/horror and the Medieval sense of the word, the artistic moment when the profane melded into the sacred resulting in pious but often terrifying works. He grew up loving the tasteless and mania of splatter gore pictures, and yet rather than ape the free-flowing body fluids of the works of Sam Raimi or Herschell Gordon Lewis, Del Toro uses his more excessive effects in the aid of atmosphere. For though he often makes horror films, and damn good ones at that, his approach can be just as readily applied to his (relatively, as he doesn't waste money) big-budget Hollywood blockbusters.

Pan's Labyrinth is a masterpiece precisely because it reveals the director's knowledge of his strengths. He recognizes the current of atmospheric terror and imaginative horror/fantasy that runs through his work and strips away the detritus until he's left with the core of his auterial vision -- of wickedly dangerous but attractive iterations of classic fairy tale creatures, loving shots of creepy crawlies and of clocks and their innards. Upon that rock he builds his church, a vision of heaven and hell that comes less from a religious text than the minds of Lovecraft and Poe. In my review of Let the Right One In, I placed that film in a sort of unofficial triumvirate of fantastical horror stories involving children with the great Night of the Hunter and this opus, the three collectively representing the responses of pre-adolescents to terrifying circumstances. Night of the Hunter turned the stalkings of a murderous psychopath into a grim (or Grimm) fairy tale, while Let the Right One In dealt with teenage loneliness and hormonal rage with a romance both Platonic and thinly sexual.

Ofelia (Ivan Baquero), however, faces much larger problems. Set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Pan's Labyrinth foists not just personal but sociopolitical terror upon the shoulders of its 10-year-old protagonist. Thus, her emotional defense mechanisms require greater fortitude and commitment to maintain some sense of sanity. As such, the film contains an almost boundless imagination, borne from the mind of a child who carries with her old, leather-bound copies of fairy tale books that look as if they collectively weigh as much as her.

Her father, a tailor, died in the war, though we don't know where his loyalties lied nor even if he served in the military. The mother, Carmen (Ariadna Gil), remarried to the fascist Captain Vidal (Sergi López) and suffers through complications from pregnancy. Vidal, an unsettling embodiment of the inherent fascism of male dominance, has his new family driven out to the Spanish countryside where he is mopping up lingering cells of Communist fighters. He risks his wife and his baby's health, but "a baby should be born where his father is." Already traumatized by the death of her father, Ofelia must contend with this terrifying man and the violence he perpetuates.

She finds a respite from these worldly concerns by following a stick insect (or fairy) to an ancient stone labyrinth near the estate Vidal has commandeered for them. Inside, she a spiral stone staircase leading deep into the ground, where she finds an antechamber filled with mysterious carvings and one very tall faun. The faun tells her that she is not borne of mankind but of the moon, the spirit of a long-lost princess of a forgotten realm and that he shall guide her back to her rightful home ere the full moon.

First, though, she must prove herself with a series of tasks. After completing each one, the faun gives her some reward to help her for the next trial. When Ofelia's mother begins hemorrhaging terribly, the faun gives the girl a mandrake root to place under Carmen's bed to heal her. Ofelia clearly views the faun as a much-needed father figure, but she's still a child and therefore can be quite insolent when she feels like it. More than once, she openly defies Vidal (the only character brave enough to do so to his face), disappoints her mother by ruining a pretty new dress in her adventures -- she enjoys going to be without supper as it spares her Vidal's presence -- and ignoring some of the faun's instructions, to horrific consequences.

Perhaps the greatest distillation of what makes a movie came from no-nonsense, versatile maestro Howard Hawks, who said, "A good movie has three great scenes, and no bad ones." Pan's Labyrinth certainly qualifies, and its three great scenes are some of the most memorable of the decade. The first involves Ofelia meeting the faun in the underground chamber. For all his size and distinctive design, the creature melded perfectly into the walls. Aided by Doug Jones' unassailable body language -- if you need to put a guy in a costume, you're not doing your film a service if you don't hire Jones -- the faun conveys wisdom and authority in his movements but also giddiness and care. Del Toro and his makeup and costume team of David Marti, Montse Ribe and Xavi Bastida craft the faun out of the elements: he seems less goat-like satyr and more wooden Ent, borne of the earth, stone and flora from which he emerges to meet Ofelia, looking all the more real because he is (Del Toro only uses CGI when what he wants cannot be physically recreated). When he says to the girl, "Do not be frightened," she isn't, nor is the audience, precisely because he's such a beautiful and striking creature.

The second is the harrowing scene of Del Toro's take on the myth of Persephone. Ofelia must travel through dimensions to the home of a dangerous creature to retrieve a ceremonial dagger. The faun warns the girl not to eat anything she finds there. Inside the portal is a terrifying vision indeed, of a humanoid monster frozen at a table, sat before a pair of eyes on a plate without sockets in his face to house them. Of course, the rest of the table is covered in mouth-watering food, and Ofelia can't help but grab a couple of grapes (you just can't find good pomegranate seeds anymore). The rest of the scene is the most nerve-wracking, suspenseful thing Del Toro has ever filmed; Gene Siskel used to complain about films putting children in danger for a cheap emotional impact, but had Del Toro placed Vidal himself in this situation, chased by a lumbering, hissing monster with eyes in its clawed hands and permanent blood stains on its mouth (also played by Jones), he would still have generated nail-biting terror.

The third great scene of the film, and I'm surprised to say this, involves a grisly torture scene. I'm not one to dictate what can and can't be shown on-screen, but the recent upswing in gratuitous torture porn has been the most revolting (and most inadvertently revealing) trend in contemporary cinema. To hear that Del Toro, a fan of splatter pictures, conducted a torture sequence should send me running for the hills then, yes? Well, no; in fact, Pan's Labyrinth is one of the only torture scenes in the movies (the haunting sequence in Godard's Le Petit Soldat being the only other example that comes to mind) of torture that Jonathan Rosenbaum calls "artistically justifiable on some level." Taking into account Rosenbaum's predilection for identifying and loudly decrying (as one should) what he perceives to be the fascism of many productions, that seemingly tepid compliment might as well be a pullquote on the DVD cover. It helps that Del Toro, whose sumptuous visuals made the rest of the film so inviting, curbs his style back to stark horror in the scene. As Vidal prepares to torture his stuttering captive, Del Toro uses only shot/reverse shot structures with cold lighting as the captain holds up various tools and describes the future of their "relationship" together. Del Toro then cuts away from the action, returning only to find the prisoner a horrific, bloody mess without forcing us to sit through the process that turned him into it. The scene ends with an act of mercy by the local doctor (who's been healing the other side the whole time) as powerfully felt as any of Ofelia's more noble actions, and I daresay that it ends a depiction of violence and tyranny on a note of beauty.

Yet while we all might (rightly) laud praise upon Del Toro's jaw-dropping visuals and his sense of flow, one must also pay attention to his script, not only the tautness of the emotional journey but of its allegorical qualities. All of Ofelia's tasks in some way connected to the real issues affecting Spain. Ofelia ventures to and old, mighty and gnarled tree to find a giant, slimy toad inside. It is bloated and greedy, the animus of Franco's fascism, which rations out food to the populace but lavishes upon its officers and honored members palaces and feasts. The Pale Man, whom Del Toro described to costume designers as "a fat man who suddenly lost all his weight, is the emaciated shell of the old Spanish monarchy, itself once fat on the blood of the peasants and capable of seeing only that which they wanted (hence the eyes in the hands) but now stripped of its privilege and authority but still a terrifying and murderous creation. Even Ofelia's baby brother is symbolic, representing the future of Spain. If the baby stays with Vidal and his ilk, Spain itself stays in the hands of the fascists. When Ofelia refuses to sacrifice him on the faun's orders, it's as much as declaration of her unwillingness to damn the country as it is a testament of familial bonds.

While she might have been upstaged by the child actors of Let the Right One In, Baquero gives one of the most memorable performances ever seen by a kid. She is somewhat bratty and overly precocious, yes, but she's also, out of all the kids we normally see, rebelling not only against adults but an entire system that most of us would condemn. She's also brave and ethical even at her worst, which is more than you can say for most characters (or real people, for that matter) at any age. Del Toro also extracts great work from his adult actors, particularly López as the sociopathic Vidal --near the end of the film he's on the receiveing end of a Glasgow smile, which makes him look uncomfortably like the Joker out of Nolan's Dark Knight -- and Maribel Verdú as Mercedes. Verdú is known for playing the sex goddess (see Y tu mamá también), but here she plays a haunted, sad housekeeper whose fury is unleashed in the end, a wrath that can rival Vidal in pure intimidation. It's one more aspect of Del Toro that might be masked in the shadow of his stunning visual acumen, and yet more proof that he's one of the finest directors working anywhere in the world today.

There are those who will ask whether Ofelia's adventures are real or imagined, as if the answer means anything or proves its quality or lack thereof. The film opens with its ending, played backwards as a dying Ofelia's blood returns to its wound; perhaps, then, the events were not only imagined but created on her deathbed, a final, hallucinatory fever dream à la Mullholland Dr. But does that make any of this less "real"? If this is some escapist reverie, why is the sound design so harsh and immediate, from the constant creaking of wood to the crunch of of Vidal tightening his leather? I do not care whether what happened was true or if Ofelia makes it all up to comfort herself and send her soul to her vision of heaven, because that's not the point. Pan's Labyrinth is a tragedy, yes, but also a vibrant examination of how a child processes and internalizes horror and a flawless vision of what that horror might look like when mixed with her innocence and imagination.

Y tu mamá también

Alfonso Cuarón, one of the so-called "Three Amigos" of contemporary Mexican cinema (the other two of course being his friends and collaborators Guillermo Del Toro and Alejandro González Iñárritu), is possibly the most balanced of the group: he's able to mix Iñárritu's grasp of character with Del Toro's grand scale. His Children of Men remains the greatest science fiction film of the decade, and the best since 1998's Dark City if not 1985's Brazil, and he gave us the only truly well-made Harry Potter film yet released (and it's likely to stay that way, considering David "Just cut out all that silly character nonsense" Yates is seeing it through to the end).

Y tu mamá también is not Cuarón's first film, but it's the one that put him on the map of the cinephile community and paved the way for his successes this decade. Its premise is simple but, as is the hallmark of all great films, it turns clichés on their heads and delivers a final product unlike any other. Had Cuarón been born an American, he might have taken the road trip of two adolescents on the verge of adulthood and mined it for cheap humor, as we are wont to do. Instead, he presents us with a story of lust, humor, sadness and the losses we incur when we grow up. Along the way, we see it grow into a metaphor for the class gap in Mexico.

Tenoch (Diego Luna) and Julio (Gael Garcia Bernal) bid farewell to their girlfriends, who are leaving for a summer abroad in Italy, in the opening moments of the film in the ay that young lovers do: by getting one last piece of nookie. They have their ladies swear not to bed any men in Europe, only to go skirt-chasing themselves the second the plane leaves Mexican airspace. Their efforts are unsuccessful, and soon they're trapped in the terrible vise of ennui.

The pair attend an opulent wedding -- Julio comes from an upper-middle class family, while Tenoch's father is a high-ranking politician -- and meet Luisa (Maribel Verdú), an older woman and wife to Tenoch's cousin Jano. The brash young men try to impress her with talk of a road trip to an exotic beach (a made-up location they dub la Boca del Cielo, or "Heaven's Mouth"), but she's having none of it. Later that night, however, she receives a phone call from her husband admitting his adultery, and she decides to accompany the boys.

As they set out to their imaginary destination, Julio and Tenoch attempt to one-up another in terms of pure braggadocio, each trying to seduce Luisa with tales of their sexual prowess. When they prod her for her own sexual past, she responds in more measured terms, focusing on her first love (who died in an accident) and her crumbling relationship with her husband. While the men's tales only concern the fulfillment of lust, of conquest, Luisa's reflect love, albeit not in the naïve you might expect.

When she calls her husband to bid a final farewell, she breaks down and seduces both of the boys to ease the pain. Rather than give them some sense of satisfaction -- considering how badly they were trying to win her favor -- it brings out mutual resentment and jealousy. Each boy is so thrilled at the idea of having sex with this older woman, but we see how their previous sexcapades did not truly provide any experience, as they seem utterly clueless when confronted with a woman who actually knows what good sex is. Coupled with the jealousy of watching the other man sleep with her, they drop all pretension and reveal themselves for the children they really are.

Only when Luisa threatens to leave them do they calm themselves, and she becomes the instrument of their sexual awakening. The film culminates with a moment of shared passion between the three of them that alters them forever. Too often films of this nature believe that they turn the characters' world upside-down, but Cuarón truly rips apart everything these men thought they knew about themselves, and it understandably scares them.

As they drive across the Mexican landscape, Cuarón beautifully juxtaposes the drunken, pot-smoking antics of the boys with the decaying Mexico just outside their filthy car windows. Beggars surround them at all times, yet they pay little heed to the sea of needy. When the trio stumble across a deserted, exotic beach, they pay a local fisherman to share his food and guide them around the beautiful area; then the soundtrack breaks for one of the frequent narrational asides, mentioning that, in the future, businessmen would destroy this unmarred location to erect a resort, forcing the fisherman to work for them as a janitor. The film as a whole takes places at the end of the Institutional Revolutionary Party's 71-year reign, giving the lads' journey of self-discovery a political undertone and using them as personifications of the nation's transition under Vincente Fox.

Those layers make an already fascinating narrative that much more rewarding. Y tu mamá también combines so many messages and emotions so effortlessly it's a wonder that the film manages to move at such a brisk pace. It certainly helps that Cuarón's camera floats among these characters so gracefully that, as with Scorsese's movements, you're more inclined to view it as another character than an observer.

Hilarious and sad, straightforward and layered, Y tu mamá también is one of the greatest films of the decade. What a shame that films like this cannot even face the MPAA ratings board for fear that it would be given the NC-17 kiss of death, while the trashy violence of the Saw series only rarely has any trouble getting by with an R.