Making the Transformational Moment in Film

by Dan Fleming

  So how do we start so quickly to care about somebody in a film? This happens easily in some films and not at all in others, so remains a slightly mysterious phenomenon in some ways. Opposite is the opening of Wristcutters, a Love Story, a film about an afterlife (2006, directed by Goran Dukic).

  We watch Zia (Patrick Fugit) wake up and look around his disastrously untidy room. We feel him slump a little at the sight but then he sets to, tidying up, putting things away, arranging his desktop, watering his pot plant, cleaning (all underneath the film's opening titles), so we share quite effortlessly his satisfaction in seeing everything eventually spic-and-span. Who hasn't been there? We have a moment to admire the results as Zia goes to the bathroom in the background but then, as the camera dollies slowly in towards the bathroom door, the suspicion dawns on us that he has been putting things in order prior to cutting his wrists. The awful inevitability of what we are about to see creeps up along with that inexorable camera movement. One last look at himself in the mirror, now ashen-faced, and Zia slumps onto the tiles, his final breaths moving some clumps of dust and hair that he missed in his cleaning, to and fro in the corner of the floor.

  The point about how this is done – its sheer matter-of-factness – is that it leaves us in absolute desperation to find out more about Zia one way or another, not because he has engaged us with emotionality but because we have watched him painstakingly tidy his room. As it turns out, we will get to know and like him in an unexpected afterlife that is much like this life, only a little stranger.

  There was a kind of shortcut at work in that opening to Wristcutters – getting inside what it is like by simply watching somebody do something recognizably ordinary before the extraordinary intervenes. The unnecessity of emotion in this is worth remarking on, as a simplistic assumption might be that emotionality – for example Robin Williams's mimicking of “deep” emotions in What Dreams May Come – is necessary to our feeling of engagement in these kinds of moment. It is clearly not.

  Indeed, there is a trick here that we can see used most effectively by director Phillip Noyce in Patriot Games, a film based on the Tom Clancy novel that requires us to get quickly up to speed in terms of caring about the central characters before the narrative starts piling on the action in typical Clancy fashion.

  What Noyce employs, along with actors Harrison Ford, Anne Archer and a young Thora Birch, are familiar techniques to draw the audience in to what it is like to be these people right at the beginning of the film. But this version is so deftly done that it is worth looking at (p. 195). We begin with a tracking shot through a house empty of people but warmly furnished with signs of family life. A telephone answering machine kicks in and it is Ford (character Jack Ryan) asking their housekeeper to take care of some mundane things for them while they are away (like faking replacement goldfish if their daughter's have not survived). Piled-up bills beside the phone, and Atlantic Monthly magazine, say ordinary but smart people. Cut to Harrison Ford on the other end of the telephone, in a hotel room. A back-of-the head shot, just to play the recognition game with the knowing audience, Big Ben through a nighttime window to fill in the details, shoeless feet up despite the fairly crisp business shirt saying brief family downtime for a man with important things to do.

  Wristcutters, a Love Story (2006)

  Then Harrison Ford does one of the little physical actor's tricks that he is so adept at, putting the phone down and rolling over the back of the sofa onto cushions on the floor where his wife and daughter are playing Monopoly. It is that bodily “gesture,” that unexpected but humanizing movement, relaxed, playful, real, which makes the moment. We like this man right away. We do not need any signs of his feelings for his family in order to understand those feelings. They are there in that one movement, telling us about how comfortable he is in the moment with his wife and daughter.

  The chatter about the board game can be completely unexplicit about their relationship and at the same time say how happy these three people are together.

  So everything is being communicated without being acted out, is in the physical ease of the characters with each other and in the recognizable ordinariness of what they are seen doing.

  A little later the waiter delivers champagne and candles. Cathy Ryan's idea (typical of him not to have thought of it but he is glad she did) and we are set up for a conventional romantic interlude, seen on screen so many times. But again a little bit of actorly business from Ford lifts the moment. He does not quite get the scene organized before his wife comes out of the bathroom, so she catches him perched slightly comically on the bed in his business shirt and colorful boxer shorts. Ford freezes the position just long enough for us to smile, as much at the playful re-working of an otherwise utterly familiar scene as at the comical sight. Then Archer and Ford perfectly mirror each other's actions and gestures – sipping champagne, reaching for the bedside lights – in a way that says practiced but not tired familiarity with each other.

  The next morning, young Sally Ryan is trying to distract a motionless guardsman outside Buckingham Palace as her mother snaps her picture. The moment is played out at more length than one might initially expect as Thora Birch does a little dance and salutes, all to no avail as the guardsman remains unmoved.

  But these things have been enough. What it is like to be these three people has been telegraphed to us using basic but effective cinematic tricks and it works. The film can then throw any amount of jeopardy at them – as it does starting with a terrorist car-bomb seconds later – and we do care. At least up to a point, as a Tom Clancy story is never going to let us get any deeper than where we are already with them. That is largely enough, however, for this genre of film. And without that time spent doing this telegraphing, the action film becomes all action and very little else. While this kind of telegraphing is very conventional, Ford's roll over the sofa is a touch that lifts it beyond the over-familiar.

  What becomes clear from even just the previous two examples is that what it is like may be communicated without much internality being offered to the film viewer. In Wristcutters, after the opening sequence, we are left wanting the film to offer us some of that internality because we have already started to care about the young man who cleaned up his room. And in Patriot Games, a typical but well-made piece of action cinema, we have connected with the family before we find out much about what is going on inside their heads or what kinds of feelings they may have, which are things that the genre is typically clumsy at handling in any case.

  We can take this insight about the separation of what it is like from internality (the expression of feelings, emotions, states of mind) considerably further by looking at the 1998 Japanese film After Life (called Wonderful Life in Japan) directed by Hirokazu Koreeda, one of the undisputed high points in the “life after death” genre.

  Set in a way station for the processing of the recently deceased, After Life builds slowly. We see a number of people sign-in. Each gets directed to a separate interview room where it is explained to them: within the week they have to choose one memory from their life, which will be staged, filmed and screened by the staff. Videotapes of their lives are available for them to consult if they need to. Only then can they move on and that one chosen memory is then the only memory that they will take with them when they go. We watch one after another of the dead sit on the other side of the tables recounting memories or struggling to do so (many of these are non-actors talking in an impromptu way about their own memories).

  Patriot Games (1992)

  Like Wristcutters, the matter-of-factness is immediately seductive. The fanciful nature of the film's central premise is counterbalanced by the ordinariness of the way station, a rather time-worn place with cracked paint and rickety furniture. It is staffed by people whom we discover have been unable to choose their own memories and hence have got stuck here, processing others instead. Among these is Takashi (played by Arata), assigned with a young female staffer to interview new arrival Ichiro (Naito Taketoshi), frame 3
opposite. Ichiro, a widower, is having a great deal of difficulty finding a memory from a life that appears to have been utterly uneventful, routine and passionless. The film has an almost documentary quality in these interviews, observing silences, waiting for the words to come, the camera staging things in very simple shot-reverse-shot setups across a table.

  Naito Taketoshi's performance as the older man is quietly naturalistic, revealing little by way of clues to what he is thinking or feeling. In fact for a while he could be one of the non-actors, given that so little “acting” is evident.

  And yet, gradually, the film builds up a sequence of interconnections that are emotionally wrenching for the viewer. As Ichiro reviews videotape of his life, he settles eventually on one brief moment when he and his wife, whose long marriage had been politely comfortable but without much depth of feeling, sit together on a park bench (6). A good memory can come from being in somebody else's happiness, he explains. This memory is recreated in the way station's studio. Takashi watches from behind as Ichiro sits beside his wife (played by an actress) one last time (7). We are kept distant from the moment, the emotion all in the idea rather than in the performances per se.

  But Takashi has realized that he himself some fifty years before had sat in that park beside a younger version of Ichiro's wife, her young first husband about to go off to war and, as it turned out, to his death. He hunts through the way station's film archive to find the memory selected by Ichiro's wife when she herself had passed through. When he finds it, it is of her as the older woman she was when she died, but sitting beside a young officer in uniform (8). Going back to the tapes of his own life he finds that moment – two young people sitting together, one of them himself (9). Takashi has found his own memory.

  Without ever trying to get “inside” its characters in any conventional way – for instance in scenes of high emotion or talk of love and loss – After Life builds a heart-breaking series of interconnections across their lives and stages these for us so undramatically that this very quality of restraint becomes almost unendurably moving.

  After Life also illustrates a still more subtle technique for exploring what it is like. We think for quite a long time that it is Ichiro, the seemingly older man, that we are struggling to get to know behind his unresponsiveness. And indeed we do gradually get a sense of what it is like to be Ichiro. But the layering of Ichiro and Takashi's memories means that we suddenly realize how much we understand, at the same time, of what it is like to be Takashi, the “young” man who got stuck at the way station when he died in World War Two and could not choose a memory of his own.

  This transference of what-it-is-likeness from one character to another is something that director Alain Resnais achieves to stunning effect in Love Unto Death (1984), written by Jean Gruault, who had been a star screenwriter of the French New Wave.

  The film begins with Simon (Pierre Arditi) dying on his bedroom floor from what appears to be a sudden brain hemorrhage, watched by his very distraught wife Elisabeth (Sabine Azema). So in this series of examples, this is the first instance where a conspicuous display of emotionality is foregrounded; indeed we are plunged straight into a scene of some considerable emotional intensity. But minutes after a doctor has declared Simon dead, he “miraculously” shocks Elisabeth by appearing on the stairs, complaining of a headache. The explanation – of a near-death experience and misstatement by the doctor – is initially accepted by everyone. Almost every subsequent scene has Simon and Elisabeth touching affectionately, as if to underscore the feelings that have not just survived the experience but been intensified. However Simon's behavior gradually changes as does his mood. His affectionate moments with Elizabeth start to look almost imperceptibly like he is acting out what he should feel rather than what he does feel. These brief scenes are interspersed with shots of snow falling in darkness, accompanied by powerfully suggestive music by Hans Werner Henze, whose dislocating work is confined to these unsettling shots as if to comment on the scenes they punctuate, chipping away at any sense of emotional normality.

  After Life (1998)

  Simon starts to convince himself that he should be dead and is somehow living on borrowed time, dissolving away. Images of bees swarming on a tree, a farm building on fire or a tumorous growth on a plant in the laboratory where Elisabeth works, suggest something of the film's shifting tone and the notion of disturbances to a natural order. Then Elisabeth follows Simon to the riverbank and what we are suspecting becomes certain – we have been watching the stages in a person being brought to the edge of suicide. Except that Simon is shortly thereafter struck down again by the ticking bomb in his head that he had evaded for a while. This time he does die.

  This, however, is where Resnais’ film pulls off its structural coup. We have been so preoccupied with seeing Simon through Elisabeth's eyes that we have not quite noticed it is Elisabeth's what-it-is-likeness that we have been drawn into. And it is Elisabeth who is now recognizably depressed and contemplating suicide. Up to this point Love Unto Death has not used any of the familiar tricks to draw us into a conventional sympathy for the characters. There has even been something unsettlingly ritualistic about the repeated vignettes of affection between Simon and Elisabeth, the very repetition serving to distance the viewer rather than absorb them. Simon's thinking about his near-death experience has been fascinating to observe but it feels like precisely that – an act of rather detached observation.

  At this point, though, it is as if a switch is thrown and we are inside what it is like to be Elisabeth, having spent the first half of the film alongside her as it were. Quietly intense drama ensues as her friends Jerome and Judith (Andre Dussollier and Fanny Ardant), a husband-and-wife team of church ministers, try to talk Elisabeth out of her suicide. The question of whether she will go through with it becomes profoundly compelling, as do the to-and-fro arguments marshaled by her two friends, and the film is entirely given over to these for the remainder of its length.

  So we did not get to “know” Elisabeth via any of the conventional tricks like those we saw at the beginning of Patriot Games. Nor, interestingly, did her early outpourings of emotion over Simon draw us in. If anything these seemed more of a spectacle to be observed (like the bright red sweater she was wearing), while we tried to figure out what was happening in Simon's head, psychologically as well as medically. Then paradoxically, Sabine Azéma's performance as Elisabeth turns still, resolute, austere and undemonstrative at precisely the stage where we suddenly find ourselves caring so much about her. So once again, the mystery of how we come to care about a character in a film has less to do with them opening up to us in some intimate and revealing way and more with the careful staging of our attention – in this instance with how we are moved, in the several senses of that word, from Simon to Elisabeth.

  The capacity of Alain Resnais’ Love Unto Death and Hirokazu Koreeda's After Life to be moving without being sentimental brings us to the question of sentimentality itself.

  Resnais’ actor Pierre Arditi (who plays Simon) has described the director's working methods in detail. He notes that Resnais did “dry takes” and “wet takes” so as to be able to modulate the affective level: in other words, scenes were shot with and without explicit emotionality from the actors, allowing Resnais very precise control over the on-screen expression of emotion. As we have seen, affective intensity for the viewer is not necessarily matched to “wet takes.” In fact, in the right circumstances, as suggested by the examples we have been looking at, the “dry take” carries the greatest affective charge, like those shots on the park bench in After Life.

  Love Unto Death (1984)

  We will be coming back to the use of “wet” and “dry” takes when we look again at the work of Samantha Morton on River Queen, as well as on her own directing debut, but before we do so it is necessary to develop our understanding rather more fully of the relationship between emotion and what-it-is-likeness.

  The Hollywood “weepie” Penny Serenade (1941), direct
ed by George Stevens and with cinematography by the great director of photography at Columbia Joseph Walker, who worked with Frank Capra and Howard Hawks on some of their best films, is a textbook lesson in handling emotion to classically full effect. Irene Dunne and Cary Gant play Julie and Roger Adams, who lose their unborn child when Julie miscarries. Unable to conceive another child, they adopt a little girl. When Roger loses his job they struggle to keep the child.

  In the scene opposite, Roger has gone to the judge's chambers to support his petition to retain parental rights despite his straitened circumstances. Julie waits at home fearing the worst. Roger is accompanied by Miss Oliver, the head of the adoption agency, played by Beulah Bondi, a stalwart Hollywood character actor of great though often unremarked upon skill.

  The second part of the sequence, after Roger's appearance in front of the judge, is staged with the full panoply of emotion-extracting techniques that gave the “weepie” its name as a de facto genre. With Julie, we do not know the judge's decision. Stevens and Walker frame her alone in the house, literalizing the empty family space that she fears (frame 3). Then when Roger arrives we cannot see through the pane in the door whether or not he has brought back the child (4). The camera pans with agonizing slowness from Julie towards…a grinning Roger holding the baby (6/7/8). A “wet take” of Irene Dunne reacting caps the moment (9).