The Great Director
- The great director looks for a deep subtextual interpretation of the text.
- The great director is passionate about character and narrative.
- The great director prefers a direct approach to the material, a simple approach, an economical approach.
- The subtextual interpretation drives performance and camera choices.
- The audacity of the interpretation transforms the experience from simple to surprising.
- The great director is very assertive about expressing his voice.
- The same can be said about the style of the film; it is unusually distinctive.
What differentiates the great director from the good director is the business of this chapter. To recap, the good director adds value to a project. Using the narrative tools of character, plot, and story form, the good director uses a counterpoint approach to give a layered reading to the text. We are surprised and delighted by surprises that deepen the story. Guided by his director’s idea, the director orchestrates the visuals, performances, and text readings to create a subtext that again deepens the experience of the film for the audience.
The great director transforms the experience of the film when he utilizes his director’s idea to add a powerful voice to the film. When the computer Hal becomes all too human and the human astronauts all too cold and mechanical in “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), Stanley Kubrick has told us something profound about our attachment to technology and human progress. Again and again in that film we are struck by this level of commentary on human progress through history. Kubrick uses irony to enhance his voice and in so doing challenges many of our beliefs about progress.
Thirty years earlier, Charlie Chaplin had made similar observations about human progress and human nature in “Modern Times” (1936). His focus, however, was more specific—the factory. Chaplin’s ironic observations on the mechanization of production and how dehumanizing these progressive processes are veer into tragedy (and reveal his creative genius) when the main character is accidentally absorbed into the innards of a machine. Visually and spiritually, he is being consumed alive by the machine.
Both “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Modern Times” are examples of great films made by great directors. Each transforms a narrative into a way of perceiving the world and the behavior of the people in it differently. This transformation is the mark of the great director. I should add that great films have been made by directors who have exceeded their previous work. In other words, great films have been made by good directors. “The Best Years of Our Lives” (William Wyler), “High Noon” (Fred Zinnemann), “Singing in the Rain” (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen), and “West Side Story” (Robert Wise) are examples of this phenomenon. In this chapter, we will focus on great directors rather than great films, as our job is to understand how, through their work, directors become great.
Forty years ago, Andrew Sarris in his classic book, American Cinema, created a hierarchy of American directors and he referred to the top tier as the pantheon. This category included D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Orson Welles, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Ernst Lubitsch, F.W. Murnau, and Fritz Lang. Excluded or relegated to a lower tier were directors such as Stanley Kubrick, George Stevens, Frank Capra, and Preston Sturges. It is not useful here to redefine the top tier with regard to great directors in an attempt to refute Sarris; rather, I want to focus on the development of an operational definition of the great director. We will examine the works of three contemporary directors to develop an operational definition; however, before doing so we must turn to the issue of voice.
Voice
I dealt extensively with the issue of voice in my book Global Scriptwriting (2001, Focal Press). Essentially, voice can be genre specific, or the director can use genres that enable his voice. Genres such as satire, docudramas, fables, experimental narratives, and nonlinear films require a distancing from character and structure so the voice is clear rather than embedded in a character. Irony is a favorite distancing device. When the voice is genre specific (for example, Joseph Mankiewicz in the melodrama “All About Eve”), it is usually expressed by the attitudes of the characters and the choice of words (dialogue) used to articulate those attitudes. The worldly theatricality of Addison DeWitt, the narcissism of Margo Channing (and the witty aggression that protects it), and the disingenuousness of Eve Harrington are all qualities that create the voice of Mankiewicz. He enjoys the energy and wit of the theater but none of the politics of stardom.
Voice, whatever the genre, is made powerful by the great director. It can reach its apogee in film noir, as in the case of Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard,” or it can join/be influenced by the choice of subject matter, as in the case of François Truffaut and his films about children—“The 400 Blows” (1966), “The Wild Child” (1970), and “Small Change” (1982). On the other hand, it may be subsumed by an attitude about being in the world, as in the case of Krystof Kieslowski, whose concern was always about existence, its quality, its containment, its need for the joining/affiliating with another human being—as revealed, for example, in “A Short Film about Loving.”
In addition to the very strong voices of great directors are particular characteristics that mark their work. First, the work is marked by a level of passion that is unusual; a good example is Carl Dreyer in his silent film “The Passion of Joan of Arc” (1928). A second quality is the capacity to stake out a distinct position in the film; this capacity is notable in the work of Roman Polanski, who we will discuss later in the book. His film “A Knife in the Water” (1962) exemplifies this characteristic. A third quality is a simplicity in the director’s approach to the subject. Ernanno Olmi’s “Il Posto” (1965) is a good example of such simplicity and is enormously powerful. A fourth quality is an economy of narrative, or the ability to say a great deal in a single shot; Luis Bunuel’s film “Belle de Jour” (1967) and Ernst Lubitsch’s film “Ninotchka” (1939) are good examples. Finally, the great director has a distinctive style that may resemble a documentary, as in Roberto Rossellini’s “The Rise of Louis XIV” (1968) and Gillo Pontecorvo’s “The Battle of Algiers” (1968), or may be highly stylized, as in Luchino Visconti’s “The Leopard” (1965) and Federico Fellini’s “8 1/2” (1962). Whatever mix we find in a particular director, these qualities only serve to strengthen that director’s voice.
Three Contemporary Great Directors in America
Although this section is about American directors, I must say I struggled with my choices. What is one to do with Peter Weir, the Australian who has been making films in America since “Dead Poet’s Society” and “Witness”? And what of Sam Mendes, the British theater director who is responsible for two great American films—“American Beauty” and “The Road to Perdition”? What needs to be said is that Hollywood has always been the creative home for immigrants and even temporary visitors. The first Academy Award went to a film called “Sunrise” (1927), which was directed by the German F.W. Murnau. Charlie Chaplin, Ernst Lubitsch, and Alfred Hitchcock all immigrated here, and the latter two were famous in their native countries (Germany and Great Britain, respectively). William Wyler, Fred Zinnemann, Billy Wilder, Milos Forman, and Paul Verhoeven all emigrated from Europe and each made significant American films.
When I look at the films made over the past 30 years (excluding the work of the directors we will discuss shortly), I can identify ten great films made by great directors: Bob Fosse’s “All That Jazz” (1981), Robert Altman’s “The Player” (1992), Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” (1994), Paul Anderson’s “Boogie Nights” (1995), Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” (1998), Sydney Pollack’s “Tootsie” (1983), Terence Malick’s “The Thin Red Line” (1997), Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers” (1994), Michael Cimino’s “The Deer Hunter” (1997), and Clint Eastwood’s “Mystic River” (2003). All are great films by great directors.
My choice of directors to discuss here was based on their work over the last 30 years. Each director has, on an ongoing basis, used a director’s idea that has powerfully amplified the experience of his work. We will look at each in turn: Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen, and Martin Scorsese.
Francis Ford Coppola’s films “The Godfather” (1972), “The Godfather: Part II” (1975), and “Apocalypse Now” (1979) share a common director’s idea: to view the narrative events of each film not as believable but rather as an opera, which requires an intensification of dramatic events. “The Godfather” and “The Godfather: Part II” each revolves around Michael Corleone as the main character. The choices Michael must make are between his career (professional) and his family (personal). In each film, Michael chooses the professional option and sacrifices his family. As in opera, where celebrations and crises are the focus, Connie’s wedding, her husband battering her, the assassination attempt on Don Corleone, the assassination of Sonny, the baptism of Connie’s baby, and the killings of all those responsible for acting against the Don and his business interests all mark the original “The Godfather.” The assassination attempt on Michael on the day of his son’s confirmation, the assassination attempt on Hyman Roth, the Cuban revolution, the discovery by Michael that his brother Fredo betrayed him, and the settling of all accounts, including the murder of Fredo, mark the sequel, “The Godfather: Part II.” Both films treat these events as set pieces so there is a ritual feeling to these narrative events. The focus on the intensity of death, love, and life events supports the operatic feeling. Stylistically, Coppola takes a very deliberate, slow approach to all of these set pieces. The result is the antithesis of realism, a theatricality I suggest is more opera than film.
The “film as opera” director’s idea is equally at play in “Apocalypse Now.” War films tend to present realistically, with a focus on the main character’s survival. Coppola’s operatic approach posits the war as madness, and the main character from the outset struggles to hold onto his sanity. The soldiers’ progression up the river to deliver an assassin to kill the rogue officer, Kurtz, approximates a series of set pieces on the river Styx. By the time we reach Kurtz’s camp, the feeling is that we are in hell, and by the time the main character obeys his order to kill Kurtz we fully believe he may be a good soldier but is madder than a bat in hell. He has accomplished his mission but lost his mind. This is Coppola’s view of the effect of the war in Vietnam on America. By using an operatic director’s idea he has made even more extreme the narrative events of “Apocalypse Now” and created a film experience that functions as a war film on a narrative level but is transformed into an internalized psychodrama commenting on that war. Coppola’s voice is loud and clear.
Woody Allen’s director’s idea is equally as powerful and enhances the film’s voice just as it did for Francis Ford Coppola. Allen’s director’s idea is to be both a performer (stand-up comic) and a character in his films. When he is acting as stand-up comic, he speaks directly to the audience, breaking down the wall between the film’s character and its audience. When he assumes the role of a character in the film, he remains in character and relies on the narrative strategies to invite the audience to identify and empathize with his character. In brief, Woody Allen’s director’s idea is as a writer/performer/director to step out of the film from time to time to comment on the ongoing narrative. In this sense, he is closer to the Marx Brothers as a comic persona/performer than he is to Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, or Jerry Lewis.
Woody Allen is also profoundly influenced by the great filmmakers Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini. The consequence is a series of homages such as “September” (1987) and “Stardust Memories” (1980), and their influence can also be seen less directly in most of Allen’s work, such as “Crimes and Misdemeanors” (1989) and “Broadway Danny Rose” (1984). In “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” the darkness of human behavior, so central a theme for Bergman, manifests itself in the ophthalmologist who gets away with commissioning the murder of his mistress. Faith, or the loss of it, is also addressed in the work of both filmmakers. A circus (or clown) theme is prevalent in the attitude and work of Fellini, just as it is in Allen’s “Broadway Danny Rose.” Closely related to the circus idea is the magic of the movie media, the theme of Allen’s “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” a film that echoes Fellini’s “The White Sheik.”
But it is in Allen’s films about love and relationships that we see his director’s idea most powerfully at play. Looking at “Annie Hall” (1977), “Manhattan” (1980), and “Hannah and Her Sisters” (1986), we can see that each focuses on different variations of relationships. First, in “Annie Hall,” we see the relationship between a Jew and a Shiksah, a gentile very different from himself. In “Manhattan,” the focus is on the relationship between an adult and a teenager, where age, not cultural background, is the barrier. Finally, in “Hannah and Her Sisters,” the difficult relationship is between a married man and his sister-in-law. Allen plays a central role in the first two films and a more subsidiary role in the third. Each film explores the need for love (a relationship) in the ultra-urban, upper middle class society of modern New York. In each case the love is crucial and intense, but the relationships are doomed to failure, so the focus is on the bittersweet outcomes of the relationships. Two of Allen’s later films, “Husbands and Wives” and “Deconstructing Harry,” focus on lonely characters, survivors of doomed love relationships.
To examine more closely how the director’s idea works, we turn first to “Annie Hall” (1977), in which Allen assumes the role of narrator to comment on the narrative action, on being a Jew in a gentile society, on his relationship with his mother, or on other dimensions of feeling like an outsider. Allen feels free to intersperse such commentary freely throughout the narrative. Another strategy is to have the characters themselves address the audience directly, as he does when he introduces his classmates from junior high school to the audience. Visually, each is five years old, but they tell us what they are doing or have become as adults. The contrast between the angelic visuals and misanthropic futures—“I’m on methadone,” “I’m a prostitute,” etc.—is startling and makes the point that life disappoints and is not what it seems to be in one’s childhood.
A third strategy Woody Allen uses to break down the wall between film characters and audiences is probably the most famous scene in “Annie Hall.” Allen is in line to see Ophul’s documentary, “The Sorrow and the Pity.” Behind him two academics chatter on, the man trying to impress the woman with a flood of McLuhanesque observations and interpretations. Allen’s character grows increasingly frustrated and eventually walks away, only to reappear with the real Marshall McLuhan, who proceeds to tell off the academic, after which he leaves the scene. This intervention in the narrative serves to bring the real world into the film.
The performer/character strategy is used to heighten the romanticism in “Manhattan” and to give the characters in “Hannah and Her Sisters” the opportunity to confess, in a therapeutic fashion, their desire and their guilt. In both cases, the strategy amplifies the narrative and transforms it from a love story to a commentary on a particular time and place—New York, today. In a sense the director’s idea has made Allen not only an impassioned storyteller (Fellini) but also a modern philosopher on our lives and times (Bergman).
To understand the director’s idea that operates in the work of Martin Scorsese, we need to review the films of Roberto Rossellini, Robert Bresson, and Yasujiro Ozu. In their films, characters who have an inner drive to be valuable and to be validated find the world a disappointing place. In “Open City” (Rossellini, 1945), the disappointment is in the realpolitique of fascism operating to corrupt a society and its individuals. In “Mouchette” (Bresson, 1970), it is found in the indifference and cruelty of communities and families to a simple, underprivileged young girl. In “Tokyo Story” (Ozu, 1953), it can be seen in the selfishness of one generation (children) toward another generation (parents). In each story, a character operates or lives by a moral code that simply does not help them. It is as if a character seeks or lives within a state of grace (spirituality) that the family or community or society does not share. The consequence is disappointing but on another level is tragic.
This tragedy, the gap between the inner life of a character and the lives of the character’s surrounding family, community, or society, is the thread that runs through the work of Martin Scorsese. His characters seek a state of grace but what they find is a material world, a political world that cannot nurture them. Indeed, it is a world that does not accept them, and the results are often tragic. The search for a state of grace is Scorsese’s director’s idea.
This director’s idea is clearly at play in Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” (1987) and “Kundun” (1999), his film about the life of the Dalai Lama. In a more subtle way, it is the subtext of Jake LaMotta’s journey in “Raging Bull” (1980) and Travis Bickle’s search in “Taxi Driver” (1976). The casting of Robert De Niro in both roles further underscores the restless, searching inner life that amplifies the director’s idea.
Much has been made of the tone of Scorsese’s films. Implicit in his director’s idea is the clash between what the character wants and what the character gets. It has been said that Scorsese has a propensity for creating film noir, but I believe this not to be the case. The tone is dark in “Taxi Driver,” “Mean Streets” (1973), and “Casino” (1995), but I believe that the darkness has more to do with the narrative outcomes than a deliberate attempt to produce film noir. In “Raging Bull,” for example, LaMotta is no longer a champion. He has lost his family due to continual wife battering and is alone. We see him rehearsing a monologue for a nightclub routine and realize that he is a man exploiting his own fame and former glory to make money to pay off his debts. In this scene, Scorsese presents a man who has fallen from the state of grace he enjoyed within the aesthetic of combat in the ring. That was LaMotta’s moment, and when he lost it he was set adrift in the material world. This is LaMotta’s tragedy. He has fallen from that state of grace that allowed him to associate with something larger than life. The ring, the combat, and being the middleweight champion meant everything to him.
Another aspect of Scorsese’s work needs to be addressed—his style. Scorsese uses an active, searching, moving camera, such as in the nightclub entry shot in “Goodfellas” (1990), the balletic tracking shots in “Raging Bull,” and the dynamic preparation for battle shots in “Gangs of New York” (2002). Scorsese uses the camera, together with chiaroscuro lighting, to create energy and to imply the restless search. The energy is the desire, the moving camera the hope, and the lighting the anxiety that hope will be dashed and desire will be disappointed. This stylistic approach underpins the director’s idea. It articulates how very much the character hopes he will find a state of grace, and the use of lighting indicates how difficult the goal truly is.
Each of these directors transforms his narrative into something bigger, deeper, and different through his director’s idea. In the case of Coppola, his operatic approach turns a gangster story into a powerful evocation of immigrants (the Corleone family) who are steeped in family values at the outset but lose their way. Power corrupts Michael Corleone and he loses everything that he and his father valued. Under Coppola’s direction, their saga becomes a tale of America as paradise lost.
In the case of Woody Allen, his performer/character director’s idea allows Allen to comment on the importance of love and relationships to his characters and how, because they are outsiders (e.g., Jewish or a writer), his characters remain outside the possible realm of enduring love. Consequently, his films capture the paradigm of contemporary American life—material success and spiritual ennui.
Martin Scorsese also is concerned with values in American life but by using his director’s idea, the search for grace, he deepens the paradox. In this successful place, America, the divine is always elusive and the inevitable disappointment leads his characters to violence and self-destruction. They suffer the fate of living outside grace.
These dark perceptions of American life have powerfully countered the popular image of American life that includes success, material wealth, and power unprecedented in world history. These three great directors have asked important questions and provided alternatives to prevailing and popular views.
Three Contemporary Great Directors Outside America
Great non-American directors have concentrated on particular issues, with perhaps the most significant being the universal issue of tradition versus change. Particular filmmakers, such as India’s Sajajit Ray (“Pather Panchali,” 1955) and Japan’s Yasujiro Ozu (“Early Spring,” 1956), have implicitly advocated tradition, while others, such as Spain’s Luis Bunuel (“Exterminating Angel,” 1960) and France’s Jean Luc Godard (“Weekend,” 1968) have aggressively advocated change. Other filmmakers have represented creative movements—Italy’s Vittoria de Sica and neorealism, Germany’s G.W. Pabst (“Pandora’s Box”) and expressionism. Others have decided their creative agenda should be reexamining the past in order to find a way toward a better future, such as Poland’s Andrej Wajda (“Ashes and Diamonds,” 1960) and Hungary’s István Szabó (“Mephisto,” 1982). Still others consider reconsideration of genres (based on their culture) as a way to introduce other cultures to their societies and introduce their societies to other cultures, such as Akira Kurosawa of Japan (“Seven Samurai,” 1956) and Bille August of Denmark (“Pelle the Conqueror,” 1986). Finally, some have used the fable to press their countries to embrace change, such as Germany’s Werner Herzog (“The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser,” 1984) and Michael Verhoeven (“The Nasty Girl,” 1989), as well as France’s Coline Serreau’s (“Chaos” (2002)).
Whatever the approach, Europe and Asia have contributed mightily to the category of great directors. Before proceeding to discuss three directors in greater detail, I would like to mention a number of films and their filmmakers that represent great directing. If this book was solely about the subject of this chapter, the following directors would get the amount of space they deserve.
In the category of great directors, I would include Volker Schlondorff (“The Tin Drum,” 1979) and Tom Tykwer (“The Princess and the Warrior,” 2001) from Germany; Mike van Diem (“Character,” 1998) from The Netherlands; Eric Zoncka (“The Dreamlife of Angels,” 1998) from France; and Thomas Vinterberg (“The Celebration,” 1997) from Denmark. “The Celebration” (or “Festen,” as it was called abroad), the first of the Dogme films, is probably the single most influential European film of the 1990s. I would also include Elem Klimov (“Come and See,” 1987) and Nickolai Michalkhov (“Close to Eden,” or “Urga” in Europe, 1994) from the USSR; Bernardo Bertolucci (“Beseiged,” 1999) from Italy; Krystof Kieslowski (“Red,” 1995) from Poland; and Xiang Yimou (“Hero,” 2002) from China. Each of these films transforms a narrative into a creative challenge to tradition or genre in unique and special ways. Having noted these great directors and their films, I will now take a more detailed look at three contemporary non-American directors.
The choices here are abundant. To choose just three, I identified a notion that would tie together three filmmakers. Rather than seeking a national, stylistic, or creative (e.g., Dogme) commonality, I looked for filmmakers who exhibit a certain freedom in their choice of narrative tools to tell their stories. The directors I have chosen to discuss here—Pedro Almodovar, Denys Arcand, and Emir Kusturica—share the attitude that narrative tools should be driven by the directors’ narrative ambition to tell a culturally specific story that nevertheless reaches beyond borders. These filmmakers are looking at the global themes of friendship, family, the roles of men and women, birth, death, love, and relationships to tell their stories in ways that have made each of them important throughout the world of film.
Pedro Almodovar has been making films for more than 20 years. Initially, he made melodramas about being gay. In the last few years, however, Almodovar has settled on a specific director’s idea that has transformed his work. Almodovar’s director’s idea is that men and women exist in each of us, whatever our gender. The result is a male nurse and a female bullfighter in “Talk to Her” (2002) and a father who has become a woman with breasts and an actor who has also become a woman in “All About My Mother” (2000). In “All About My Mother,” the story is essentially that of a mother who, at the outset of the story, loses her adolescent son in a car accident. She then returns to Barcelona to tell the father, her husband, only to discover that he has become a man with breasts. But he/she is as irresponsible a person as he/she was before the sex-change operation. The mother chooses to live with a friend, an actor who has also had a sex-change operation. The story is rounded out by the inclusion of a pregnant nun whose family has rejected her. The woman’s husband dies of AIDS, the nun dies in childbirth, and a new family is formed when the female main character and her transsexual friend adopt the baby, albeit the new father is visually a female. The story sounds dark, but actually Almodovar’s bright art direction and cinematography lighten the mood, which becomes one of acceptance of all these characters and their personal transgressions and gender blurring.
That blurring is more subtle in “Talk to Her.” This film focuses on four characters and three relationships. The first relationship is between two men: a male nurse and a journalist. They are introduced to us at a dance performance just before they meet for the first time. The course of their relationship is the core of the story. The male nurse is rather feminine, while the more masculine journalist is gruff and mildly depressed. There is always the feeling that the male nurse hopes that this relationship might evolve into a love relationship (but it never does).
The second relationship in the film is between the male nurse and a comatose female dancer. He was so taken with her in life that he became a patient of her father, a psychiatrist, in order to see her. Later, after an accident, she becomes the nurse’s patient. He is very happy to care for her. He is a man in love, but late in the narrative he rapes her. She becomes pregnant and eventually awakens from her coma. Prior to her awakening, the male nurse is imprisoned and, seeing no hope, commits suicide.
The third relationship is between the journalist and a female bullfighter he interviews. They begin an affair that is suddenly interrupted when she is gored by a bull. Her injuries are so severe that she remains in a coma for a long time. In this phase, the fact that both the journalist and the male nurse have someone they love in a coma brings the two men closer together. They have grown very close when the bullfighter dies. At this stage, the two men console one another. The film ends by suggesting the beginning of a fourth relationship—between the journalist and the now-awakened ballet dancer. They see each other at a dance performance, and the film ends where it began.
This story summary does not do justice to the director’s idea. All aspects of being a man and of being a woman are explored. The performance helps blur gender distinctions. The caring exhibited by the male journalist for the male nurse, the emotionality of the male nurse, the cerebral character of the dancer, and the masculine professional aura and personal hysteria of the bullfighter all blur gender lines.
As in “All About My Mother,” the art direction and camera choices in “Talk to Her” are sunny and lift the film away from the tragedy of the events in the film. In both films, Almodovar has challenged fixed ideas about men and women—cultural, sociological, and political. He has created characters that move us, and their stories help us redefine how we view gender in our own societies.
Denys Arcand is a Quebec filmmaker whose early work in documentary was quite political. For over 30 years he has been making feature films that increasingly have moved away from strictly political subject matter. Since 1987, with “The Decline of the American Empire” (essentially a comedy of manners), Arcand has focused on values rather than politics; yet, in some ways, his films since then have never been more political.
The characters in “The Decline of the American Empire” are adult intellectuals who want to fulfill their desires—sex, food, drink—and they are critical of a society that focuses on social organizations (family, church, state) rather than on the individual. This brings us to Arcand’s director’s idea. For him, the artist, who may be an academic or an actor, has an obligation to challenge society, to challenge all of the -isms. For the artist, values are a moral shield against materialism, against intellectual dogma, against political dogma. The artist represents the satisfaction of desire and a responsibility to care for another (lover or friend or fellow citizen). In his later films, such as “Jesus of Montreal” (1995) and “The Barbarian Invasions” (2003), Arcand’s director’s idea is presented full force. Because the latter is a sequel to “The Decline of the American Empire,” we turn to it first.
The artist in “The Barbarian Invasions” is the same academic we met in “The Decline of the American Empire,” but now he is dying of cancer, and the film ends shortly after his death. This is not a film about dying, though. The main character is his son, an economic success story. The son hates his father for leaving the marriage (at the end of the previous film). Upon his mother’s urging, however, he comes back to see his father. The couple’s other child, a young woman, has escaped to a sailing life in the South Pacific. The son returns to Canada to find a health system falling apart. He seeks an opinion from a childhood friend who is now a cancer specialist in the United States; however, the father refuses to die in the United States. He wants to die in Canada surrounded by friends—and sex, food, and wine. The son buys comfort for his father, bringing in his friends from abroad and providing heroin for his pain. By helping his father legally and illegally, the son discovers that there is more to life than economic success. We leave the son moved and perplexed about his own future (and his values).
What is interesting about this film is that Arcand takes a cue from Woody Allen. Arcand’s characters speak to us directly as they criticize all the intellectual and political trends of the academic’s life. By doing so, Arcand leaves us with the impression that the love that these friends (male, female, gay, heterosexual) have for one another is the real life, the worthwhile life, while the -isms of life are transitory and unimportant, just chatter in the overall scheme of things.
Whenever possible, Arcand presents the public face of a hospital or the police and then undermines this rule or that rule with a humane response or outcome. It is as if Arcand is saying that there are rules (about heroin, for example) that simply do not apply when a citizen who ordinarily lives by the rules is dying. The strategy then becomes a more moral one, a more humane one. As a result, in this film we see businessmen, nurses, and policemen transgress to help an academic die without pain and with dignity. This is the experience of “The Barbarian Invasions,” which presents law and social order as barriers to what is best for the individual, and transgression is seen as moral and humane. This is Arcand’s transformation.
The director’s idea in “Jesus of Montreal” is even more pronounced and transgressive. The artist’s role is taken by a radical actor who is asked to stage the Passion play. The play is to be performed in the open on a mountain in Montreal. The sponsor is the church, and the producer is a priest, who is having an affair with an acting school classmate of “Jesus.” “Jesus” gathers a group of actors, among whom one has been lending his voice to dubbing foreign pornographic films and another has been “prostituting” herself in beauty commercials. When the cast has been assembled and the Passion play is performed, the roles ennoble the actors and they become the characters they are portraying. “Jesus” becomes the radical critic of all things materialistic. He disrupts the production of a commercial (an attack on the Temple clerics and their activities), and the actresses become Mary and Mary Magdalene. They have found grace and they turn against the lives they have led. This terrifies the priest who has produced the play. He shuts the play down mid-performance. Jesus is badly injured and is taken to the hospital by the two actresses, but he walks away only to die in the local subway station. He dies as Jesus did, for the sins of others—the priest, the “priests” of the media, and producers and directors who exploit their actors and the public.
As in “The Barbarian Invasions,” it is difficult to distinguish between a play being performed by actors and the actors who become the characters they are portraying, and Arcand speaks directly to us about values. In “Jesus of Montreal,” he gives us a classic and modern passion play in which “Jesus”/Arcand, the character/voice of the writer/director, forces us to question our values. For Arcand, the choice is clear: Modern material values must be seen as transient and as less important than deeper communal values and spiritual values. It is telling that Arcand positions a priest, society’s bearer of spiritual values, as one of the antagonists in this film. Once again, the organizations of society have failed the individual. The artist as radical voice upholds the spiritual values that Arcand associates with Jesus in “Jesus of Montreal.”
Emir Kusturica is a Muslim who has made the majority of his films in Serb Orthodox Serbia. Kusturica’s director’s idea is to portray the Middle Eastern male personality by exploring its vitality, its creativity, and its self-destructiveness. From “When Father Was Away on Business” (1986) through “Underground” (1999), Kusturica has explored all aspects of maleness, but probably no single film presents a more hopeful arc than his “Time of the Gypsies” (1992). “Time of the Gypsies” tells the story of Perhan, a gypsy adolescent raised by his grandmother. His choices are simple—to be a caregiver like his grandmother or to be a man like his uncle, a worker who has returned from Germany. All his uncle’s relationships have failed and his compulsive gambling is all but ruining the family. The narrative follows Perhan through work and helping his crippled sister, marriage to a childhood sweetheart, his sexual paranoia about her, her death in childbirth, betrayal by his benefactor, his murder of his benefactor, and his own death at the hands of the benefactor’s family. At the end, his son will be raised as he was by his grandmother.
Superstition, passion, and paranoia are mixed in with youthful idealism, and in the end Perhan succumbs to the male disease of jealousy, which leads to hatred and violence, thus destroying the idealism that was there in abundance when Perhan was an adolescent. It is as if Kusturica was trying to portray a life with a slowrelease poison embedded in it. When enough poison is released, the life ends, a fate that is inevitable.
The director’s idea is presented in such a way that, as the narrative unfolds, Kusturica gives full rein to each of the feelings. In the early scenes (visually and in the performances), we perceive the idealism. These scenes are funny and charming. As the narrative shifts rather abruptly to paranoia, dark actions and dark visuals replace the earlier sunny tone. Performances are modulated differently so as to be appropriate to this layer of the Middle Eastern male personality. Each phase of the film requires a different tone. When we pull together all the different tones, we have the layered experience of the Middle Eastern male persona. Of course, in this world the women and children are the greatest victims, and their various presentations throughout the film help flesh out a fuller sense of the male personality. The experience of “Time of the Gypsies” is quite unlike almost any other film experience. It is exhilarating and exasperating and exhausting. And, in its richness, we find a layered sense of life in someone else’s skin—the Middle Eastern male.
Each of these filmmakers has a different director’s idea, but each has used narrative devices to transform their stories into a new view of men and women (Almodovar), of spiritual values in a material world (Arcand), and of life and death in a particular culture (Kusturica). Now, let’s turn to the specifics of those tools that directors use to realize their director’s idea.