Sorry zedz but I'll have to take you to task for the
Liebestraum diatribe. Not only do I not think it's "flat-out awful", I hold it dear as easily one of the great narrative films from the 90's and certainly the best thing Figgis has ever done (and I like much of his work). It was one of the first films I ever saw that taught me how to understand the capacities of narrative through loaded though often oblique, associative details. Its plot builds this way and is dependent upon that structure for its entire effect. It's an approach Figgis took again with his almost equally brilliant
Loss of Sexual Innocence, though there he presents it all far more directly as an "art film". To be honest, your comments on this one suggest that you either missed the point of it or simply dislike the approach and/or find the thematic content entirely negligible to start. I'm assuming it's the latter. But if this is so at the very least it neglects Figgis' genius at sublimating his themes through his gorgeous prism of magisterial imagery, all so sensitively attuned to the nuances of narrative detail and successfully extrapolated thematic richness.
I don't want to regurgitate what I've already said over on the dedicated thread so let me just respond to some of your points and make a few of my own.
zedz wrote:The script is laced with pretentious asides about architecture, but these are so grotesquely artificial as to suggest some kind of screenwriting dare. If you decide to take a shot of vodka every time somebody mentions what material the building the characters are squabbling over is made of, you’ll miss the entire second half of the film, so this particular drinking game is highly recommended. SPOILER: It's cast iron and it's irrelevant.
No, it isn't. The entire point of the architecture theme as I read it is to contribute one more note to a chorus of complementary verses. It functions perfectly in tandem with everything else and is not in any way just some arbitrary detail. My architecture knowledge is zero but certainly within the film we are meant to understand Nick's infatuation with the building as a slightly safer, though still dangerous, analogue to his attraction to Jane. And the attraction to Jane, in its own way, exists purely as an extension of the building, a representation of the singular uniqueness of this specific site and yet its simultaneous continuity through time--its always already existing presence in the moment and the way that can reassert itself in the particularity of events. Figgis clearly underscores this by constantly depicting the building as a virtually haunted place (even the way the lights flicker on the first time the power goes up makes this point), but what elevates his art is in his supreme confidence; the way in which he understands and willingly relinquishes to the excess of style. This is profoundly effective because it makes his point, with the content validating the style and vice versa, while at the same time acting through its allure as an appropriate enticement for our own involvement in the narrative and its meaning.
zedz wrote:Figgis is painfully desperate to create a dark and stylish look and an uncanny atmosphere, but his approach is so entirely derivative of Bladerunner and Blue Velvet and little else that the effect is simply gauche and ridiculous.
There’s an amazingly silly sequence with a drunken cop that comes off like the night-ride sequence in Blue Velvet by way of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. There’s a completely irrelevant deleted scene that augments this (already completely irrelevant) narrative detour and is even more outlandishly pretentious and faux-Lynch than the rest of the film – a must-see, obviously. The most interesting thing about the film is that, in ham-fistedly aping Lynch, it actually anticipates some of his own later verging-on-self-parody work.
Well, first of all it's really too bad that it sounds as though you saw the awful US DVD which consigns the brothel scene to status as a "deleted scene" when, in fact, it is absolutely integral to Figgis' vision. Thankfully the UK DVD preserves the film as it is meant to be understood in its organic wholeness.
Anyway, you are right that Figgis's style is derivative of Lynch and Scott. This is absolutely true. But Figgis does not
use it derivatively. What I mean is that, for one, Figgis clearly understands what can be got from his style and what was got so successfully from the practitioners of the past. Beyond this, the majesty of his work is, once again, that it is actually far more subtle than it seems to be. He knows this material deserves this treatment and will benefit from it (in this case by transfixing the viewer) but he also knows very well how to integrate his themes into the design pattern of his picture in a way that allows each idea or aspect to steadily filter in and influence one another until the film itself is suffused with complementary themes all functioning toward one more or less specific end point (that is in itself ambiguous by virtue of how much we come to understand is contained within).
The episode with the sheriff is actually much more elusive in intent and design than you're giving it credit for. It's important to recognize
when it happens within the flow of the narrative, what it highlights or accents. It is in the most blunt sense about the introduction of a chaotic or personally destabilizing force; it reflects Nick's enchantment with Jane as indicated immediately prior in the kitchen scene and immediately afterward in his dream. The shot that opens that whole sequence, by the way, deserves special attention. You could say, I guess, that it's an "amazingly silly sequence" but that misses Figgis' extraordinarily careful method of composition, the unsettling aspect to the scene and the way certain themes continue to flow beneath and persistently assert themselves despite the appearance of episodic randomness. Nick waits in the car as the sheriff relieves himself in, yes, hilariously long take form right outside. But Figgis isn't just going for some cheap gag. If he was he wouldn't shoot the scene almost completely shrouded in obscuring shadow. That obstruction complicates our response, as does Nick's own non-reaction and the extreme protracted nature of the scene. It also emphasizes the nagging uneasiness that never flags, a vibrant dislocating quality (or, if you prefer, the genuine mix of absurdity and unnerving repulsion that would accompany such a moment in reality).
Anderson is superb throughout this film and that's because he's completely on Figgis' wavelength. There's no way a moment such as the one in the back of the cab could work otherwise. You may argue that it doesn't work still but I suppose that depends on what you think it's trying to do. That scene, another barely palpable moment actually, has everything to do with the recognition of an undeniable continuity through time (as acknowledged by the driver through his coded comment) and Nick's resistance to accepting that idea (his vague uncertainty and incomprehension as the lights pass over him and, in effect, embalm him in an ephemerality which properly reflects that resistance).
But it does more than that. Such a moment is totally in keeping with Figgis' comprehensive aesthetic methodology. There are, as you note, many similar instances. But this is not a case of pretty pictures for their own sake (though they are undeniably gorgeous images); these moments articulate his purposes. For one thing, the excess of style, maintained throughout, works to situate the entire film on a slightly alien register, an indicator that the events depicted hold together as one and that their "non-realism" points toward a different intent than simple depiction of immediately recognizable, believable human behavior.
Beyond this, though, the style functions as a further dislocation because it is all about fatalism and determinism and the co-existence of that with the more finite circumstances, being caught in that "ephemeral" glow. Once again, the affected but totally maintained nature of Anderson's performance is critical to an understanding of this. It's not a bad performance at all; it is, in fact, perfectly attuned. Nick is ultimately caught within the fabric of the piece; he is no more or less "believable" than anything else. There is an acknowledgment here of his status as a component element of a grander design. And it's this notion itself which goes sublimated and willfully unacknowledged by the character; it is this that motors much of the disquiet throughout (it's not for nothing that Nick wakes screaming). There are intimations of this everywhere, from the high melodrama moment-in-time obviously artificial image of Nick and Jane turning into an embrace as they emerge from the elevator under white hot Oliver Stone lights to the very image used on the theatrical poster itself: a shot of Jane, the photographer, holding up her captured image of Nick for closer observation within a dark room suffused with red light.
And to say that such an approach is "self-conscious" is unduly dismissive. Figgis is consciously using overt style, yes, but not in some obnoxious over-academicized fashion. He's not making some labored comment on its deployment, he is just deploying it period as a perfect way of expressing his complex thematics. The approach here is so much more rarified and confidently accomplished than in some of Figgis' own more radical experimental work, such as the miserable
Hotel for instance.
The brothel scene (the "deleted scene") is really key to the picture; it is in no way "irrelevant". I quoted Figgis on the other thread talking about the point of it, the exposure to women who want to be exposed to men as a form of "empowerment" through raw aggression. The way this force allows for Nick to experience them differently, as he is put in the subservient position and made vulnerable. And, once again, the way this reflects on his attitudes toward Jane and his mother and the notion of what endures as particularized by the haunted signifier of the Ralston building.
Just to reaffirm the fact that the film is not some collection of wildly deployed superficial stylistic motifs, as you purport it to be, I'll let Figgis have the last word here. I imagine you may find what he has to say to be banal and obvious. If so, there is really little left to be said. From the published screenplay:
Mike Figgis wrote:The link between sex and death is a very strong and fascinating one to explore. When people close to us die, the sexual urge becomes very strong as an affirmation of being alive. In Liebestraum, the character Nick finds himself in a situation where he is visiting his mother, a mother he's never met before, a mother who is obsessed with sexual guilt and jealousy for her husband/son. So, he finds himself in a situation where he's presented with the chance to be promiscuous: he doesn't really know why, but it's a fascinating world to be drawn into. So, what I tried to do in the film is not to play it in a particularly sexual way, but to try and change the atmosphere.
There is also the fatalistic aspect of sex. People are fated to get together and it's not necessarily to do with a kind of 1960's idea of sex being good, clean fun. The cleaner and more wholesome you make sex, the less interesting it becomes. It also demeans it as the strongest and most basic instinct we have, and separates it into a containable compartment--which American film has done.
