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Although greeted with far less hubbub than those orange drapes (which I’m not completely disparaging – that it encouraged jaded New Yorkers and bubbly tourists alike to gather in Central Park during a frigid winter, everyone milling around and a festive atmosphere in the air usually reserved for spring, is quite something), Gregory Colbert’s photo exhibition, Ashes and Snow, currently running in Manhattan through June 6, deserves at least that level of fanfare. Housed in the very post-modern Nomadic Museum, a temporary construction built out of shipping containers and reassembled in various locations throughout the world, the space itself is worth the trek out to Pier 54.

The moment I stepped in, chills went down my spine. Though its focus on human interactions with animals might sound like some hokey environmental action from a Canadian tree-hugger hanging out in the wilds of places like Burma, Sri Lanka, and Namibia, it is unbelievably, strikingly, to-the-core beautiful. As you walk down the wooden platform, which runs straight through the rectangular configuration, and take in the low-lighting, the white rocks on the ground beneath the blown-up images which, suspended by cables, hover above, the ambient music interspersed with diaristic voiceovers (though, on second thought, I could’ve done without the pretensions of the latter), its enveloping warmth makes you realize how little most museums do to enhance the experience of art (is it that it’s held too sacred, that galleries are afraid of doing anything which could potentially detract from the work, even if it might make it a more exciting, mutable, live experience?). Placing the human form within a tableau of natural elements - fire, water, air, earth - and effortlessly integrating it into the realms of exotic creatures like cheetahs and leopards and manatees (don’t those words just roll off your tongue?), Colbert reminds us we’re part of this natural world, though it’s easy to forget when so many of us live amidst cityscapes and suburban sprawl, tethered to our i-pods, internet connections, blackberries.

Ambling along, bombarding the fantastic sepia-toned photographs with mental questions of authenticity (can this be for real? were there any digital effects?), you arrive at the end of the walkway, a more bulbous space with stumps for sitting on, as a giant screen plays a live-action image collage from which the stills have been culled. You realize the pieces haven’t been manipulated, and it’s mind-blowing to behold. The film is an hour long, and as splendid as anything I’ve ever seen. Rendered in slow-motion, it allows you to appreciate the balletic movement of bodies, both human and animal, the play of light on water, the texture of elephant skin and long blades of grass and air bubbles.

Until a woman’s cell phone went off, I was completely under its spell. I can’t tell you how livid I was when she had the gall to answer it despite my best poison looks. That aural intrusion brought me out of my hypnosis, and many others as well. I wanted to go up to her, tap her on the shoulder, and ask if she’d been planted as a performance set-piece, the call of her electronic leash and her hearkening to it so quickly a comment upon the disparities between the show’s expressed nostalgia for nature, its longing for symbiosis with the environment and other living creatures, and the realities of the modern world. She made me feel cynical, ruining my, just minutes before, unself-conscious wonder. But I’m still haunted by the purity of my first reaction to this exhibition, weeks later. And if you’re in or around NYC, you should rush out and see it (hopefully you won’t encounter any similarly oblivious idiots who’ll take you out of your enthrallment and plunge you into dystopic futuristic visions reminiscent of Bladerunner and Brazil where previously you’d been reconstituting memories of Out of Africa and dreamily planning your next trip abroad to some unspoilt location).

- km

So I know it’s kind of a cop-out to post this in lieu of my usual weekly review, but I’ve been working on some other stuff this week, so here it is. This is one for the NYC-area folks, again. Kicking off next weekend, nascent web-based film journal Reverse Shot (full disclosure: I occasionally contribute, so you could say I’m biased, but it really is this awesome), an online zine that takes film criticism to headier, loftier heights, has programmed a full week of movies at the Makor/Steinhardt Center of the 92nd Street Y (@ 35 West 67th Street). I’m most looking forward to the Before Sunrise/Sunset double-header. Amazingly, as obsessively in love as I am with the duet, it’ll be my first time watching them back to back, and in a real theater, no less. Bring on the brilliance.

Here’s the official schedule:

REVERSE SHOT PRESENTS
April 2 – 9

DOUBLE FEATURE
Before Sunrise/Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, 1995, 2004)
Sat, Apr 2, 2005, 7:30 and 9:30pm
Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy’s chat-fest, begun in 1995 on the streets of Vienna, culminates in a tiny Paris apartment in 2004. No topic goes undiscussed, no memory goes unexplored. Taken separately, each half of Richard Linklater’s romance speaks to either the immediacy of youthful idealism or the poignancy of emotional longing. Together, they are the epic romance of a generation.
Special Guest Speaker: Cinematographer Lee Daniel
Double Bill: See both films for $15. Call 212.601.1000 to order.

demonlover (Olivier Assayas, 2003)
Mon, Apr 4, 2005, 8:00pm
Reverse Shot favorite Olivier Assayas directed this much-discussed, devastatingly NOW techno-thriller in which frigid boardroom calculations and casually cutthroat merger meetings—to claim a chunk of the multimedia pornography and violence industry—become the stuff of nightmares. Truly challenging and diabolically entertaining, Assayas’s horrifyingly relevant cautionary tale is a Mulholland Drive for our plugged-in culture.
117 min.

SNEAK PREVIEW
Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2002)
Tue, Apr 5, 2005, 8:00pm
Shelved for far too long, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s terrifying parable of computer-age loneliness and melancholy seems to reconfigure and fine-tune the rules of horror. Sad-eyed teenagers disappear one by one after logging onto the Internet. Technology becomes the conduit through which a desolate, hellish otherworld seeps into ours. Some of us couldn’t sleep for weeks after seeing this one. 118 min.

SNEAK PREVIEW
Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004)
Wed, Apr 6, 2005, 8:00pm
Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s sublime love story outdoes his Blissfully Yours in visual splendor. The first half, in which two young men tenuously fall in love, gives way to a mystical, entrancing folk legend of hunter and hunted, a mysterious shaman and talking animals. Tropical Malady uses minimal situations to stand in for grandiose treatises on the nature of love itself. 118 min.

Testament (Lynne Littman, 1983)
Thu, Apr 7, 2005, 8:00pm
The most violent war film ever—and it takes place on a suburban California street, inside a single house. For audiences reared on Dr. Strangelove’s acerbic satire and On the Beach’s detached cynicism, Lynne Littman’s quiet, devastating look at one American neighborhood’s reaction to post-nuclear fallout is an emotional wake-up call. 90 min.
Special Guest Speaker: Director Lynne Littman

The Village (M. Night Shyamalan, 2004)
[Note: Click through and read Michael Koresky's, my editor’s (also co-founder of RS) dazzling interpretation before you rewatch this slighted film again.]
Sat, Apr 9, 2005, 8:00pm
One of the most misread films of the past 10 years, M. Night Shyamalan’s trenchant social allegory—the residents of a quiet Pennsylvania village have a pact with creatures inhabiting the surrounding woods which keeps them locked within the town’s small perimeters—will undoubtedly receive its due one day. Until then, we offer you a second look at Shyamalan’s brilliant transformation of contemporary politics into mythmaking and his fascinating synthesis of 19th century gothic Americana and contemporary political doubletalk.
107 min.

For more ticket purchasing info, click here.

I saw this film a few weeks ago, and have been letting it stew, untouched, as my mind turns it over. I think I’ve been reluctant to write about it because it’s such a bleak tale (based on a true story), that to revisit it is painful. What makes it even sadder, though, is that a great movie like this can so easily slip away, despite critical accolades ringing out from nearly every respectable quarter. It played at my local arthouse for a week and then was gone. In an age of rapid turnover, there’s no grace period wherein a diamond-in-the-rough can find its niche market. If the numbers aren’t high enough opening weekend, it doesn’t matter that you were planning on seeing it in week two, it’ll be pulled justlikethat. That’s the tragedy on top of the one the film depicts.

What at first seems an attribute in a single, working mother (You) in Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Nobody Knows, a cajoling, childlike playfulness to match her high-pitched, sweet-toned voice, ultimately reveals itself as the core seed which will sprout the ruinous undoing of a family.

A foreboding sensation quickly accumulates as you witness and become accustomed to, as they have, the daily rituals of the four young protagonists. Akira (a preternaturally mature Yuya Yagira), the oldest at 12, is in charge of grocery-shopping (he’s the only one the landlord knows about, and so the only one allowed out of the house) and preparing family meals, Kyoko (Ayu Kitaura) assigned to laundry duty, and Shigeru (Hiei Kimura) and Yuki (Momoko Shimizu) expected simply to keep quietly to themselves. By day, their mother works in a department store, and by night she goes on dates, drinks, sings karaoke; an all-around good-time gal.

The incompatibility of maternal responsibility with her little-girl temperament makes itself most manifest in the show-stopping moment when, sitting in ubiquitous Japanese chain Mr. Donuts, Akira voices his first direct criticism (heretofore, disapproval of her parenting has only evidenced itself in silent, moody rebuffs): “Mom, you’re being really selfish.” She petulantly replies, without a hint of self-awareness, “Don’t I deserve to be happy, too?”

On the night before she abandons them, arriving home late, charming in that breezy buzzy way, she wakes them up, revives their spirits, even giving Kyoko a messy manicure in a dark shade of burgundy before falling asleep. It’s only later, when the camera lingers on the girl’s small hands, the last traces of polish fading from her fingernails, that we realize how much time has elapsed since she left.

The quartet go about their normal routines, studiously counting out the money left behind for them, budgeting their expenses and utilities, becoming more listless as days go by. That they are contending with these adult responsibilities, when others their age have the luxury of obsessing over manga and video games, is given ample screen attention by Kore-eda. His visual and narrative inclusions, of longing looks from behind schoolyard fences, glimpses of peers enjoying the mundane aspects of normal adolescent life, tease out this sad reality. Akira’s bitterness grows visibly as time passes, a world-weary air of resignation about him where previously there’d been a puckish resilience.

With painful simplicity, the director’s camera captures, in tender close-ups, the children’s hands and feet in various repose, their limp bodies betraying the hand-to-mouth poverty they’re enduring. Small details offer up tell-tale signs: holes marring their t-shirt sleeves, long, straggly hair, the accumulation of detritus in the sink, permanent piles of unwashed clothing on the floor.

It never occurs to them to venture outside, having internalized their mother’s directive not to leave the house, until the day Akira lovingly lines up his brother’s and sisters’ shoes by the door, turns to them with a gleeful smile, ready to liberate them not just from those close walls, but from phantom thoughts of their mother’s return; breaking her rule acknowledges the unspoken, that she’s never coming back. To the rush of happy music, their first excursion together into the outside world, in who knows how long, encompasses some of the ecstasy the characters in Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day” must’ve felt.

Newly unleashed, they take to collecting seeds from plants which have pushed their way through cracks in the asphalt (not an unintentional symbolism, surely), carting it home along with dirt collected from a nearby park, to plant in empty ramen cups. The care with which they tend the plants is achingly sweet, a way to infuse life into their dingy home, a motivational spur.

Inevitably, of course, a larger tragedy comes along, on top of the daily struggles of survival, to truly bottom things out. But even here, histrionics are avoided rather than exploited (other than one badly-chosen pop song which gives the casually-drawn film an incongruously melodramatic flavor.) It’s quietly dealt with the way they’ve dealt with everything else, diligently, because there’s no other choice, and no one to help them.

And now I’m so depressed, I have to stop writing.

- km