Ocean's Twelve (Steven Soderbergh, 2004)

Ocean's Twelve is one of my favorite Steven Soderbergh films and the best reflexive takedown of the sequel ever made. It jovially begins as a shameless retread of Ocean's Eleven before spiraling out of control by exaggerating every aspect that made that film a success until the result is a bewildering mess and a giddy commentary on the lazy self-satisfaction of most sequels. Somehow, the in-joke-heavy, pally nature of the acting among Hollywood's A-list does not lapse into pure smugness, perhaps because as much fun as the film has in deconstructing overdone studio mechanics, it also invites the audience to have fun with the cast, provided the viewer can let go of the desire for any kind of fulfillment from the plot. Ocean's Eleven sublimated all of Soderbergh's aesthetic tics into an unexpected crowd pleaser; its first sequel let all the new fans know what they were in for.

My full review is up at Spectrum Culture.

A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg, 2011)

David Cronenberg throws the audience for a loop from the start of A Dangerous Method. The stately opening credits, unfolding gracefully over close-ups of ink blotting the pages of correspondence, is so elegant that it cannot even be taken for a sort of proto-Rorschach test. It is as conventional and soft a commencement to a costume drama as credits can be. Then, Cronenberg cuts straight to a shot of Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) shrieking, cackling and hissing against the glass, resembling less her usual, composed and corseted ladies than Jane Eyre's Bertha, the embodiment of the repressed female id. In an instant, the director pushes under the "proper" surface of the period drama to confront its twisted secrets. The fact that most of the film occurs in bright daylight is no coincidence; the monsters that eat at these characters are not creatures that come out in the night. They are in all of us at all times, whether they're visible or not.

Cronenberg's style has always been formal, but A Dangerous Method is so classically composed that a newcomer would never guess its maker had also directed such body horror classics as Videodrome and Crash. Yet by placing Sabina's "hysteria" upfront, the director clues us in on his basic aim: the film is merely the psychological root of his horror movies. As Knightley writhes around in mental agony, Cronenberg fully subsumes his tumorous grotesqueries fully into the mind, which can torment the body well enough without tumorous growths or other icky, hyperbolic infections. As Glenn Kenny rightly put it on Twitter shortly after the film's premiere, Sabina, and her sexuality, is the traditional monster in a typical Cronenberg film.

Black Swan

For a time, I fretted Black Swan would reduce its protagonist to a reductive set of sexual clichés, the virginal naïf whose madness could be cured by one good lay. As someone who has grown up with various anxieties, I've always found the phrase "Loosen up" to border on the offensive, displaying an utter lack of understanding on the part of people who are surely well-meaning but also condescending and oversimplifying. As the entire arc of the prima ballerina in Darren Aronofsky warped thriller is founded on the need for her to lose control a bit, I braced myself for a childish, possibly sexist mixture of Roman Polanski's Repulsion and Michael Powell's The Red Shoes.

Instead, I got an inventive, and brutally raw blend of Aronofsky's well-established visual acuity with his budding affinity for piercing character drama. Nassim Nicholas Taleb developed an idea he termed the "black swan theory," in which an event happens that surprises everyone -- such as the discovery of black swans in the 18th century after the term had become an idiomatic expression for that which could not exist -- and people rationalize the aberration in retrospect into a shift that could have been anticipated. Black Swan itself amusingly fits into this theory, helping to explain how the maker of visual feasts with thin characterizations could suddenly leap from a film as philosophical and detached as The Fountain to one of the most perfectly executed character tragedies of the last decade.

Opening in the dreams of the aforementioned dancer, Nina (Natalie Portman), Black Swan instantly announces its blend of hand-held, grainy footage with a subjective and fanciful mise-en-scène. Nina dances against infinite black, her white tutu and pale skin glowing in the abyss as a pale spotlight illuminates only her. Dancing Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake in her head, the dream ends with the Swan Queen dancing with the evil Von Rothbert, foreshadowing the central conflict of the film to come, one that does not particularly involve an antagonist but revolves around this tango between ingénue and villain.

Nina awakes and heads to practice, where she guns for the role she danced in her sleep. Using fleet glances and mild but unmistakable passive-aggression, Aronofsky displays the competitive spirit of the dancers, exacerbated by emaciation and overwork. In the dressing room, the dancers mock Beth (Winona Ryder), the prima ballerina being edged out for her age, and the only cliques that seem to form among the individuals competing always seem to be in opposition to Nina. In the studio, some of their antagonism becomes clear: Nina is flawless, dedicated entirely to her craft at the expense of talking to the others for any extended time. So immaculate is her dancing that the theater director, Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), considers not giving her the role of the Swan Queen because while her fragility and composure makes her perfect for the innocent White Swan, she would be all wrong for the looser and more seductive Black Swan-half of the character.

Still, he selects Nina for the part and sets about training her to, in effect, mar her perfection. It's an odd notion, to improve the finest dancer by introducing impurity, and Nina has difficulties with the lesson, to say the least. Raised by a former ballerina (Barbara Hershey) whose own career ended when she got pregnant, Nina has worked her entire life toward proving herself not only among her peers but to the demanding mother that lives vicariously through her.

Thomas wants Nina to seduce the audience, and him, as the Black Swan, and Cassel pours all his leering, rakish sleaze into the role. Leroy is a womanizer, but as much as he loves toying with his stars, his sexual harassment of Nina might also be a ploy to shake her loose. Unfortunately for Nina and everyone else in her life, Thomas tears out the wrong screws, sending Nina deeper and deeper into madness from the stress.

If The Wrestler displayed the travails and heartbreaks of a professional past his prime, Black Swan demonstrates the equal difficulty of the young performer breaking into the spotlight. Randy's escape from reality occurred in the ring, but even then all he could do was bathe in the crowd's love. Unable to loosen up, Nina moves backward into further isolation, and her reality begins to shift and rupture. At the start, she notices a mild rash on her back, and as her efforts to become the Black Swan strain her further, her body reacts in more noticeable ways.

The ease with which Aronofsky recalls the body horror of early David Cronenberg makes the minuscule aberrations in Nina's flesh all the more unsettling. Whether actually splitting a toenail or hallucinating peeling off a strip of skin on her finger, Nina's failing body naturally replicates her crumbling mind, a literal embodiment of the reflective imagery that runs through the film**. Aronofsky suggests as much through mirror images (and the occasional manipulation of same) as he does through the subjective moments: often, we see a character first in a reflection, then in person. Even the characters seem to pick up on this, and they attribute a certain power to mirrors, especially when Nina equates stardom with the private mirror Beth enjoyed as the prima ballerina.

Other touches only compound the mounting insanity. The sound mix isolates the teasing whispers of Nina's peers, especially Veronica (Ksenia Solo, whose eyes look as if they were carved from ice), whose jabs are faint but crystal clear. Then, of course, there's Lily (Mila Kunis), the less talented but more passionate dancer who embodies the Black Swan as much as Nina does the White. The more Nina sinks into her madness, the more Lily filters into as the key to her deliverance but also her downfall. Much has been said about the sex scene between Portman and Kunis, but typically not for how disturbing it is in its outright eroticism. It doesn't make lesbianism horrific, mind you; the sex, as one might expect from two women, is so emotionally complex that its implications seep into the brain until one almost forgets that two gorgeous women are going at it. Almost.

This all feeds into the film's central flaw, that these fractals of tattered sanity do not add up to the same level of character insight that defined Aronofsky's previous film. The director does not particularly care for the nuance of Nina's life, defining her against Lily's forthright sexuality, Thomas' predatory mixture of lasciviousness and "hands-on" artistic molding, Beth's cracked mirror view into her own future and the mother's psychological torture. Even her bulimia seems the product more of her constant stress than a sexist purge of calories to maintain weight. Aronofsky also spares no critical eye for ballet in the same way he dug into the behind-the-scenes grit of wrestling, ignoring the deeper sexual implications of an art that depends entirely on contortion and control of every muscle (though he does at least skirt the issue with his clear looks at undulating back muscles and rigid legs during the dancers' practice)*.

By the same token, Black Swan isn't meant to be a character study nor a feminist text. It's a horror film, one that uses its Super-16 cinematography and thick grain to, yes, add a more realistic vibe to the film's aesthetic, but the grain has a double edge, also separating the audience from full involvement with its hazy sheen. It's tactile yet abstract, like Nina's characterization, and it has the effect of complicating the scares by further blurring the line between objective terror and Nina's subjective reaction to it. If Aronofsky does not plumb the same depths of tortured femininity as Polanski did with Repulsion, he at least presents a masterful evocation of the life-destroying obsession with success. It's almost political: Nina has to make her mark before she gets out of her mid-20s or she'll never make it, while the average person has to commit just as completely now just to maintain a job. Unlike Randy, and like Moira Shearer's Vicky in The Red Shoes, Nina does not want the fame; notoriety is simply the yardstick by which she can measure her mastery. Place Black Swan next to The Social Network as a look at the way professionalism and sexual repression blend in the modern world.

That Aronofsky should have chosen Portman to portray this perfection-hungry ballerina may be the touch that elevates Black Swan to near-greatness. I have long been fascinated with the actress, who always comes off as incredibly approachable -- she did, after all, just launch a production company designed to make stoner comedies for women -- but also has such an other-worldliness to her because of her beauty and intelligence that I have difficulty processing whatever character she plays in a movie because I see Natalie Portman, not Evey Hammond or that Manic Pixie Dream Girl in Garden State. Though her performance does not fully intertwine her life with her character's in the way Mickey Rourke's did, Portman at last breaks through with her finest role since Leon and Beautiful Girls by playing directly into her greatest setback. Cassel's character voices the key issue with Portman's work. The more she loses control to get Nina to the ideal performance, the more Portman finally disappears into the part in a way she hasn't done in more than 10 years. It's a critical breakthrough for the actress, and one that reminds me why I was so bowled over by her teenage performances when I discovered her early work back in my own teens.

To be sure, Black Swan can be manipulative, with its jump scares and constantly building dread that leads into one of the most draining climaxes in recent memory (an appropriate touch for a movie about a virginal protagonist, considering that the first climax is always the most bewildering). But this is not the same director who made the shameless Requiem for a Dream. Aronofsky may be returning to the same area as that movie, but Black Swan is too sly to get caught in that trap again. He's grown too much: would the Requiem-era Aronofsky have ever thought to include a moment as ice-breaking and fantastically funny as a vision of the creature that haunts Nina walking by her with a casual "Hey"? Armed with a terrific score by Clint Mansell that incorporates and refashions Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake score, Aronofsky has made a film that may, ultimately, not have much to say but speaks with such eloquence that we are held rapturous in its power. Nina spends the whole film trying to find the balance between flawed and immaculate. Aronofsky finds it from the start.


*In fact, Aronofsky's best commentary on ballet involves the occasional cuts in the soundtrack, leaving the ballerinas to dance in silence, obliterating the grace of movement with the garish, plodding sight and sound of thudding feet. Suddenly, the art of dance is broken, and we're left wondering why someone would torture herself for so hollow a profession.

**Perhaps the most disturbing of warped reflections is the collage of terrifying, abstract portraits of Nina her mother paints, half of them angelic, half demonic. It's not only indicative of the forces swelling inside the young woman but of the way the mother views her daughter, the light of her life but also the killer of her dreams.

Eastern Promises

[This post originally appeared at Cinema Viewfinder as part of the David Cronenberg Blog-A-Thon. Please take the time to check out a few other entries on this incredible director if you haven't already.]

David Cronenberg's movies, to boil them down to their simplest essence, are about identity. In his old body horror masterpieces, The Fly and Videodrome, the Canadian director deconstructed identity via physical dissolution, stripping away literal flesh to show mental breakdowns. Dead Ringers, with its conjoined twins unsure how to operate once separated from each other, visualized a split personality in a manner that even Brian De Palma couldn't have dreamed up when he tread similar waters with Sisters. So fascinated is he by the nature of identity that a director then known for gross-out horror could be the perfect choice to direct an adaptation of M. Butterfly, a play about bent gender, sexual confusion and national and ethnic clashes.

In Eastern Promises, the protagonist literally wears his identity on his sleeve, and his arms, chest, back and legs. So covered is he in tattoos that, when the film arrives to its most infamous scene, one wonders if Cronenberg shot it to show, yes, there are some areas this man has not inked. Nikolai's (Viggo Mortensen) tattoos are tribal, in a sense, coded engravings that signal to other members of the Russian mob his achievements and feats of loyalty. These primitive scrawls, more that Mortensen's imposing presence, strong jawline and impenetrable sunglasses, make him intimidating and unique in the London setting. Both Videodrome and Crash posited modernity and a too-rapid technological advancement for the loss of sanity and self-awareness, but the somber, precise photography of London suggests something else. Here, Cronenberg suggests that the growth of civilization does not force people into erratic evolutionary patterns that strip them of their base of understanding and awareness; instead, civilization simply grows and leaves some humans crushed under progress. Nikolai, with his hulking, Cro-Magnon mass and his tribal tattoos, might be a descendant of a line of people who never could catch up to the change around them.


London, after all, is arguably the most architecturally diverse city in the world. The various fires that ruined sectors of the city while leaving others unscathed have created a patchwork of styles through the various artistic movements. The city cannot seem to catch up with itself, so the prospect of some of its residents failing to adapt to the 21st century does not seem so far-fetched. That Nikolai and the mobsters he chauffeurs about are Russian plays upon another aspect of London life that splinters a single identity into multiple fragments: the ethnic diversity brought on by heavy immigration.

The first scene of the film, in fact, features characters of two nationalities, neither of them native British. A Turkish man, Azim, waits for his nephew to arrive as he chats up a Chechen man. When the boy arrives, he's so shaken up and unable to look the Russian in the eyes that we know why he's there before Azim finally loses his cool urging the boy to simply kill the bastard. Overlapping Russian and Turkish dialogue, some of it subtitled, most of it not, creates a scenario that sounds as if it should be playing out in the Old Country rather than in a barber shop in the middle of a major city.

Cronenberg then jumps from this scene, ending with dark, thick blood bubbling out of the jugular as the hiss of leaking breath churns the liquid to a seemingly unrelated scene that he links to this act of violence with remarkable subtlety. A pregnant Russian immigrant, shivering from what could either be cold or withdrawal, stumbles into a pharmacy bleeding from between her legs. As Cronenberg frames the blood dripping on the floor in close-up, he links the woman's viscous blood with that of the Russian mobster, yet only the woman's bleeding attracts any gasps, from characters on-screen and, likely, the audience. We are conditioned to accept murder in film despite its immorality and horror, yet a natural injury jars and repulses us.

The woman, Tatiana, is taken to the hospital, where she dies in childbirth. The attending midwife, Anna (Naomi Watts), finds a diary on the woman written in Russian and takes it, hoping to find out Tatiana's identity to notify next of kin. Naturally, this small act of involved kindness leads only to trouble as Anna stumbles upon the London branch of the Russian Mafia, the vory v zakone ("Thieves-in-Law"), fronted by a deceptively kind old man named Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl). Anna manages to get inside Semyon's house based on her half-Russian heritage and unknowingly tells the man who raped and impregnated Tatiana about the baby and the diary, instantly placing her on a hit list. When he learns of Anna's naïveté, her uncle, Stepan, cannot contain himself. A first-generation immigrant, he remembers the mob, and even if he mentions a past in the KGB as a drunken bluff, he knows what will come of Anna's snooping.


The tendrils of Russian influence on Anna are at once the driving motivation of the film and a thematic subplot, a microcosmic unfurling of the same forces at work on Nikolai. Where Cronenberg revealed the secret identity of Tom Stall by the end of the first act in A History of Violence, here he withholds the twist of Nikolai being an undercover agent until the end. One could argue that this is the film's chief flaw, as the twist is not so shocking that it deserves placement as a major spoiler and prevents a deeper examination of the identity issues surrounding an undercover cop in a crime ring. Yet this change allows Mortensen to add greater nuance to his acting, resulting in his greatest performance. We spend much of the film watching a man struggle with himself until Cronenberg finally provides the key, even if his easy solution raises many more questions that could have been fleshed out across the entire running time. Nikolai can go from dispassionate violence to a moment of quiet compassion when he secretly gives a prostitute the means to save her life.

By saving the truth of the character until the end, the director doesn't keep the audience guessing so much as the protagonist. From this point of view, Cronenberg's pacing proves how far gone Nikolai is within the mafia. "I'm just the driver," he says throughout the film when confronted with big problems. Rather than hide away and remind himself who he really is, his tether to reality, or his view of it, is one facet of his fabricated identity. And even that isn't really accurate, as he's also a "cleaner" and an undertaker, disposing of any loose ends and winning the admiration of Semyon, who comes to view Nikolai as more of a son than his own progeny, Kirill (Vincent Cassel).

Nothing warps Nikolai's identity like his relationship with Kirill. At first, Kirill's reckless intemperance and emotional instability place another job on the "driver's" shoulders, that of a babysitter. They work as comrades, but also share a brotherly bond. Yet Kirill looks up to Nikolai so much and receives so much more support and tolerance from his peer than his dad that he comes to view Nikolai as a father figure as well. Cassel excels at playing characters on the edge, either of political rebellion (La Haine) or unquenchable hatred and vengeance (Irreversible), and his tyrannical rage finds its perfect outlet in the mob. Like Tommy DeVito in GoodFellas, Kirill dispenses with any glamorous notions of mob life by depicting pure, unchecked insanity. And Kirill doesn't even have the dangerous wit that let Tommy get away with some of his behavior. Watching Kirill vacillate between smug arrogance and unfiltered, sociopathic violence goes a long way toward explaining why Semyon holds Nikolai in such high regard: by keeping an eye on the boy, he has the hardest job in the mafia.

Kirill also sets up a common facet of Cronenberg's theme of identity, that of sexual confusion. The experimentation grows out of their doubt, and the director's focus upon Kirill's closeted homosexuality is perhaps the most typical sexual relationship in any of his films, given that it's something we might expect from a man who grew up in a secluded boy's club that runs on masculine rituals. We learn from Tatiana's diary that he could not bring himself to rape her and instead beat the teenager to vent his sexual frustration until Semyon stepped in to "show him how it's done." Later, Nikolai reveals to Semyon that Kirill had the Chechen killed for telling people that the man was a homosexual. Most disturbingly, Kirill clearly harbors feelings for Nikolai, which would be tragic instead of unsettling if the psychopath didn't force his friend to roughly screw a prostitute in front of him, emphasizing both the father/son relationship (since Kirill already watched his real father rape a prostitute) and the sexual longing he feels for Nikolai that he expels by projecting himself onto the prostitute. Kirill wants to be inside Nikolai, and Nikolai is later tricked into posing as Kirill when the Chechen mob comes to London seeking revenge for Soyka's murder, thus literalizing Kirill's desire to be with (and simply be) his friend.


That continuous layering of identity creates a situation where, as in Videodrome and Naked Lunch, reality and illusion blur. Nikolai does not seem to have a real identity, only a memory of his mission with the mob. He leaves spaces above his heart and on his knees without tattoos not because he wishes to retain something of himself but because he's leaving them blank to be filled by the final markings of the vory signifying that he's a made man. "Sentimental value," he says when Anna refuses to sell him her motorcycle because it belonged to her father. "I've heard of that." It's a humorous one-liner you might expect from a criminal, but it signifies what Nikolai has sacrificed for his job. To have something of sentimental value, one must have some part of a personality that remains constant, and Nikolai has warped and fabricated so much that he cannot carry any objects with an emotional and nostalgic resonance.

The "cop gets in too deep" plot is so overused that Michael Mann has made an entire career investigating it from multiple angles. Yet the storyline persists because the question remains: if the breaking of laws can be forgiven, if innocent people can be hurt or even killed to maintain an identity, what then is the meaning of justice and legality? If, like all deep undercover agents, Nikolai is permitted to break the law in order to maintain his cover, at what point does he cease to become a law enforcement official spying on a cabal and instead morphs into one of the mob trying to buy his clemency through information?

Cronenberg places his own stamp on the material with his minimalistic aesthetic. Building off of the stripped-down Americana of A History of Violence, the director makes Eastern Promises into a film that's both startlingly realistic and ambiguous and suggestive. His mise-en-scène is separated from the action, above it but not looking down upon the action in condescension. While his earlier films suggested morality through Grand Guignol horror-satire, Cronenberg now glides over the action like a surgeon recording an autopsy. His lighting is cold and clinical, the objects in the frame dense but never cluttered, each item standing distinct as if everything is somehow polarized to push all other objects away.

His style is most plainly seen, of course, in his violence. Cronenberg sexualizes and fetishizes the violence in his films, yet he does not eroticize it, precisely because he never eroticizes the actual sex in his movies, instead making them outpourings of despair. Consider the scene of Nikolai having sex with the prostitute in front of Kirill; if Kirill lasciviously watching did not already sap the erotic element out of the moment, the director's decision to lay audio of Tatiana reading a portion of her diary that places this action within the context of a misogynistic, rapacious cycle only makes the scene sadder. That same mood informs the violence, which is more personal than in A History of Violence as London criminals use knives instead of guns to avoid getting brought up on an easy charge where a gangster could easily have a gun permit in the States. But the knife thrusts and slits never draw the audience. Cronenberg has an ability that Tarantino, even Peckinpah, never had: he can depict extreme violence on the screen and never make you get a visceral thrill out of it. He knows just how long to focus on blood before cutting, lingering to let the sight stick in our minds but moving on before he gets a kick out of it. When Nikolai must dispose of Soyka's body, he tells Azim and Kirill, "I'm going to go his teeth and cut off fingers. You might want to leave room." The scene starts on an absurd note, with Nikolai forced to thaw the frozen corpse with a hair dryer, but when the camera stays behind just long enough to see Nikolai start to remove identifying parts of the body with the boredom of an office worker filling out reports, the comedy turns as icy as the body he snips.

The only sequence in the film in which violence is not captured with this detached style is also the one that best proves Cronenberg' mastery. I'm speaking, of course, of the bathhouse scene, where Chechens come to kill Nikolai under the belief that he is Kirill. People discuss the scene because Mortensen fights in the buff, but Cronenberg plays the scene as an explosion of the sexual tension inherent in chauvinist groups. He also uses Viggo's nakedness to turn the stomach when the thugs slice him. We're used to an actor's shirt suddenly opening up a red line appearing as he grasps the wound in pain, but Nikolai has nothing to cover up the blood flow, and he's left slick with red stuff pouring out of him. At last, the de-romanticized sex and violence converge in the last moments, when Nikolai collapses on top of the remaining attack and grunts as he thrusts a linoleum blade into the man's eye to kill him. The quick editing is not simply a means to avoid an NC-17 rating by cutting around Mortensen's penis but a wry subversion of the male gaze, not used in the static shot of Nikolai fucking the prostitute but used here as the men grapple on each other for supremacy. It's the coup de grâce of Cronenberg's understated gore, removing all thrill and confounding the energy of the attack until you're left thinking that all of this might be avoided if these men weren't conditioned to be self-hating closeted gays.

"It's obviously a psychological thing," says Soyka as he looks upon the nervous Turk unwilling to murder him, a line that serves as an ironic joke but could also be a typically British piece of understatement perhaps passed on to the Canadian director to summarize his whole career. A man comes to worship violent TV until he starts a revolution? It's obviously a psychological thing. Unfeeling people gravitate to car crashes because it exhilarates them for one half-second longer than they've ever felt excited before? It's obviously a psychological thing. What passes as a quick gag could well be seen as a fatalistic, mournful admission of powerlessness: how else can one even begin to explain what motivates the characters of Cronenberg's oeuvre without resorting to such a weak catch-all? Yet Cronenberg does not box himself into the Coen brothers' despair, and if he ends Eastern Promises on as ambiguous and threatening a note as A History of Violence, at least he finally introduces the possibility of hope, evidenced by Kirill's breakthrough of humanity when he finally breaks free from his father's will by refusing to drown the old man's lovechild.

In less than two hours, Cronenberg packs Eastern Promises with self-contained arcs that add up to sparse but dense whole. Stepan contributes to the talk of identity by decrying miscegenation, even telling Anna to her face that she miscarried her own baby because her old boyfriend was black, as if blacks and whites were biologically incompatible like two animals from different genii. That outburst is its own moment, but it also explains Anna's quest to help Tatiana's baby, not only to serve as a surrogate but find the baby's own identity. Even cast-off lines like Kirill angrily hissing, "You don't pronounce the name of my father" to Anna when she accuses Semyon of rape develop the themes of the film, briefly bringing up an old ritual that places importance on a name, the most basic form of ID. Much of Anna's presence elicits responses like this, her inquisitiveness sorting out the web of identities jumbled by the mob, and Watts has the thankless role of moving the story along. Thankfully, neither Watts nor Cronenberg can bring themselves to trap the character in so narrow a role, and Anna comes to most conclusions herself and does not simply exist to ask the plot questions. If she does not appear in the film as often as you might expect, it's because Cronenberg makes her the moral core, and thus her routine absence from Nikolai's storyline shows how muddled his ethics are. He's left in charge of the London section of the mob at the end of the film, but we cannot be sure whether he will tear it down and send everyone to jail or if he'll continue to let the crimes they commit pass in order to get only the occasional arrest. That the final shot shows him sitting in a restaurant with the same insulated, self-loathing look on his face that marks Michael Corleone's at the end of The Godfather Part II only stresses the moral complexity and ambiguity of what may be David Cronenberg's barest yet richest masterpiece.

La Haine

Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing charted racial tensions over a single day in a heat wave-stricken New York City neighborhood. His was a slow burner, a subtle but constant escalation that eventually bubbled over into a murder and a small-scale riot. Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine (meaning "Hate") ups the ante; it opens with a riot. A visceral, incisive and, ultimately, disturbingly prescient look at how a bad situation can, somehow, always get worse, La Haine makes the idea-mongering of American History X look about as insightful as Paul Haggis' Crash.

The director takes us to an area of Paris so close and yet so far removed from the glamor or even the hip artistry of the city. He heads to the city's banlieues, run-down suburbs filled with high unemployment, drop-out rates and immigrant populations. The decrepit, sparse buildings look even worse in the riot's aftermath, inspiring only more hatred in the three protagonists. Vinz (Vincent Cassel), a Jew, rages against the police as Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui) tries to calm him down. They visit Hubert (Hubert Koundé), an Afro-French boxer, at his gym, which has been ruined by fires. Compared to Vinz, Hubert accepts this with a certain sense of resignation, though he suspects that Vinz was so caught up in the action the previous night that he might have helped burn the place.

Kassovitz builds the story slowly, through seemingly arbitrary and disconnected threads: the three are concerned for their friend, Abdel, who was injured in the riot and lies in a coma. Other residents mumble rumors that a cop lost his gun in the riot, and whoever finds it can even the odds against the armed cops. As the riot destroyed so many of the denizens' meager possessions, many charge exorbitant sums for the most banal services, a laughable ploy as everyone else is just as poor. It puts people on edge, and the increased police scrutiny brought on by the riot only turns up the heat.

Naturally, each character reacts to these harsh circumstances in different ways. Vinz, who idolizes Travis Bickle and reenacts the "You talkin' to me" speech in a mirror to convince himself of his hardness, loses himself in anti-police hatred. He discovers the lost revolver and vows to use it if Abdel dies. Hubert, on the other hand, has a more measured acceptance of the hand fate dealt him. He regards Vinz's spiral into self-annihilation with sadness a wisdom beyond his years. He doesn't like ghetto life, but he knows that violence and antagonism will not break the cycle. An intermediary between the two, Saïd simply treads water, oblivious to (or consciously suppressing) larger issues facing him, he rants about cops but is far more concerned with getting laid than getting justice.

Kassovitz won the Best Director Prize at Cannes, and his work is indeed remarkable. His mise-en-scène is well-arranged but intentionally disorienting, as he leaps in and out of the characters heads change the POV briefly before leaping back out again as quickly as he shifted gears. For all the severity of the material, Kassovitz offers a wry gag here and there: in one of the first shots, he pans over a exaggerated line of cops monitoring the banlieue, only to finally reach the end to show Saïd tagging their vehicle with graffiti right under their noses. He also inserts random asides where wholly inconsequential people tell long-winded stories to the protagonists. These stories can involve a description of a Candid Camera episode or an old man's bizarre reminiscence of his time freighthopping, but they ultimately comment on the narrative, building tension through their lengths and reflecting on the mounting tension and doom of the story.

La Haine ends on a note about as shocking as anything else that came before it, with one of the trio dead by cop and another ready to shoot the officer who did it. The screen cuts to black, and a single gunshot is heard. Who fired it? It doesn't really matter; it's merely the action that will start the whole thing over again. If the cop died, the cops and the people outside the ghetto will condemn the residents as thugs. If it was the ghetto rat, the other residents will only stir further. Either way, it means more cops and more riots in the future.

Much ado has been made in other reviews of the multiracial cast, but the deep and distressing truth of Saïd, Vinz and Hubert is that, regardless of their families' backgrounds, are all 100% French. That fact makes it all the more shocking and depressing when the boys catch a train into Paris' city limits and step off looking as bewildered as tourists. Just as the majority of the audience looked upon this dark, unseen side of France, so too do these men feel lost and unsettled when exposed to a place they don't know. The tragedy is that the area that bemuses the protagonists is the entire world outside their own.