TEN FICTIONAL FILMS OF THE DECADE (Part Two)

=6. SEPTEMDECILLION (Hypperson, 2004, USA)

http://fictionalfilmclub.blogspot.com/2009/04/septemdecillion-aka-zillion-troubles.html

=6. BIERCE THE FIERCE (Guillermo del Toro, 2006, Esp/US/Mex)

http://fictionalfilmclub.blogspot.com/2008/11/bierce-fierce-guillermo-del-toro-2006.html

'If James Cameron is the King of the World, Hypperson is the Booze in the Cooking' Keith Floyd

'[Bierce the Fierce]... is a festival, a torrid dance, a gorgeous musical death...' LA Weekly

I've written about these two at length, and couldn't split them. Both equally as good as one another in almost every way. Both haunt the back of my eyelids perennially.

5. NUEVA GERMANIA (Soren Elkjaer, 2004, Den/Ger/UK)

'No-one will ever place my words inside quotation marks.' Soren Elkjaer

Dane Soren Elkjaer has to date served up a buffet (writers: the word 'smorgasbord' is not necessitated every time a Scandanavian offers a selection of anything) of filmic wonder. Any selection might have warranted a place here. Mehr Nicht, Mehr Licht (2000) focussed on the argument about Goethe's last words. Shortly after his death, a man in Augsburg in Germany was committed to an asylum for pronouncing loudly that he really said 'Mehr Nicht' (No More') rather than the attributed 'Mehr Licht' ('More Light'), a nihilistic wail rather than the more palatable invocation, instruction, last wish, or affirmation of something. The Doctor who committed the claimant him was honoured by the city.

Or we could have picked Elkjaer's Either, OR (2006) (synopisis: Soren Kierkegaard arrives by train in the small Oregon town of Either in 1854. At 41, his health is failing. He will die within the year. He has left a doppelganger in Europe who he instructs to live a hedonistic existence. His own plan is to write alone in the distant and lonely West, in a bid to carry out the ethical half of his own Either/Or theses. But when he gets drawn into a love triangle with a widow and her daughter, this may prove more difficult than he suspected...). Or Noah's Archimedes (2001) (The Biblical boatmaker meets the Greek philosopher. Both teach each other about bouyancy, etc.), or even his spellbindingly abstract biopic Agassi (2009), starring Isabelle Huppert as the leonine racket-swinger.

But Nueva Germania may be the best: Missionary of all things German Bernhard Forster (Bruno Ganz), along with his wife Elizabeth Bernhard-Nietzche (sister of Fred, here played by Tilda Swinton) set out for Paraguay in 1887 to start a new colony and prove the supremacy of the Aryan peoples far away from the Jews. The group struggles. A failure, Forster poisons himself in 1889. Elizabeth returns home in 1893 to look after her sick brother.

During the last portion of the film, after Forster has committed suicide and the dwindling band of ex-pats are drifting in a sick sea of madness, every line of dialogue is one that has been attributed as the last words of someone famous. The jungle rejects them, her harshness forces them out. 'Friends applaud, the comedy is finished' they say, 'drink to me! Moose, Indian, moose indian...'

4: SOME EMPTY CHAIRS IN NEED OF FILLING, OR: PURGATORY (Mickey Gilbert, 2009, Ire)

When Sean O'Flanahan's play about the celebrity afterlife won a TONY in 2005, and it was announced that a film version was to be made by Warner Brothers, no-one could have envisioned this. The original play imagined Aldous Huxley, CS Lewis and JFK (who died on the same day in 1963) awaiting judgment in a grey lounge in the afterlife. They talk about Jean Cocteau and Edith Piaf, who had died on the same day a month earlier. They talk about Gandhi and Orville Wright, who had died on the same day in 1948. The film was to be a sober reenactment of the play, with the same cast.

When Ingmar Bergman and Michaelangelo Antonioni died on the same day in 2007, O'Flanahan updated the play at the last minute, the actors improvising a touching for-one-night-only acknowledgement of the directors by impersonating them in Heaven. 'I realised that this play could run forever on the fumes of such tributes,' O'Flanahan said later, and when his friend Anthony Minghella and hero Arthur C. Clarke died on the same day in 2008, his cast repeated the trick. The proposed director of the film, Mickey Gilbert, thought that the excitement caused by these spontaneous rewritings lent the project new drama: 'In Spring 2009, we had begun shooting the original Huxley/Lewis/Kennedy script. I loved it, but as a film, something wasn't there. Something topical.'

Something soon came along.

On June 25, 2009, Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett and Sky Saxon died. Gilbert quickly halted shooting, and reshot the film with his actors impersonating these three. No dialogue was changed: 'Instead of Kennedy worrying about his legacy, we had Fawcett. Instead of Lewis calming the others with warm Christian philosophies and fantasy stories, we had Jackson. We shot it in three weeks, and had it out by November.'

3. GESTERN IST NICHT DORT (Dieter Buchmann, 2001, Ger)

http://fictionalfilmclub.blogspot.com/2009/01/gestern-ist-nicht-dort-yesterday-isnt.html

I've written about this previously too, and it only continues to rise in my estimation. Buchmann's other great achievement was his thirty-two hour Unity (2006), A real-time imagining of Unity Mitford's first meetings with Hitler in Berlin in 1934, when she learned his routine so she could 'accidentally' meet him in his favourite cafe. 'Before Sunrise meets Birth of A Nation' quipped Tarantino, Quentin, CA. ''Tasteless as turkey,' said Tarantino, Betsy, FL.

2. FIN (Michael Haneke, 2009, Aut/Fra)

'Haneke's moral diction is the glue of contemporary European cinema. His existence means I can be consoled by the failure of everybody else to show us burning bodies of war victims in every film since the invention of a medium for which 'medium' is an apposite word; Medium in the sense of divining ontological informations, and medium in the sense of being very average and unspectacular. How it should be, if you will, and how it is.' Tobias Hirsch

The last film to be released on the list, ducking snugly under the tape to be the one of the best as well. A couple middle-class couple finally have a great weekend together away from lots of family business. They feel guilty at first, but then loosen up, as they deserve some fun. They then turn on the news after a great forty-eight hours in blissful solitude to discover the world is about to end. Fin. No explosive apocalypse, just the certainty that everyone will die. The couple, most of all, feel guilty for their lovely last weekend. A suggestion floats that their internal relaxation somehow is linked to this chain of events; as if, by taking their eye off the ball, it has slipped under a passing car. This idea is very much a product of a modern egocentric and workaholic mindset, and is ruthlessly skewered by Haneke.

'We mock their bourgeois ways, we laugh at their pretensions, and we warm to their companionship. Ultimately, the horror and comfort comes from exactly the same place: Haneke is telling us how small we are, and how insignificant our worries are.' Sight & Sound

'The apocalypse, when it comes, will be inconsiderate. It will wait until just before your annual two-week holiday before descending blackly, leaving you rueing that fortnight you might have used more thoughtfully had you known. People of course, won't believe it. Won't want to. Will find it inconvenient, something to be spent away, ignored, etc. It will not be concerned with our society.' Michael Haneke

THE BYZANTINE (Wim Wenders, 1981)

Opening credits. The Byzantine, in red letters, appears over a shot of the Manhattan skyline.

I Am Waiting as performed by the Rolling Stones plays on the soundtrack.

We cut to an apartment. The song is now playing on a radio. Tomas (Bruno Ganz) is a German living in New York. On this morning, he wakes from a dream. In his head is the name of a book, and an author.

The Byzantine by John Goreman.

He feels that he must find it. Near his apartment in Manhattan is an all-night bookshop. He pays them a visit, but don't have it. The next day, he goes to as many libraries and bookshops as he can, but he cannot find the book. No-one has heard of it. They recommend him books about the thrilling Byzantine Empire, and books about their gorgeous architecture, featuring domes carried on pendentives over squares and incrustation with marble veneering and with coloured mosaics on grounds of gold, but it isn't like his dream. They point him to books by John Gorman or John Goring or Jim Gawman or John Goodman, and even a book named Byzantium by John Gressman. That must be the one you're looking for, sir. But he knows that that is not correct.

Tomas is distracted, unfulfilled. He falls behind in his work. Flashes of dream come back to him, but make little sense. He must find this book. But nobody has heard of it.

At the same time, a craze envelops New York. Even many of Tomas' educated and somewhat cynical friends are entranced by a glamorous Japanese visitor, a man called Dr Otomo. He is known to America as 'The Hysterical Water Claimant' thanks to the press coverage of his demonstrations. Dr Otomo is a scientist who believes that water has the ability to absorb, hold, and even retransmit human feelings and emotions.

Tomas is persuaded by his fellow expatriate Lothar to go to a highly publicized series of talks given by Dr Otomo on the Staten Island Ferry. Once there, Tomas is perplexed by just how excited the normally cynical New Yorkers are about this. He is even more surprised that the abruptly cynical Lothar is excited too.

During the demonstration, the Doctor shows an audience how using high-speed photography he discovered that crystals formed in frozen water reveal changes when specific, concentrated thoughts are sent towards it. Music, visual images, words written on paper, and photographs also have an impact on the crystal structure. Otomo suggests that as water can receive a wide range of frequencies, it can also reflect the universe in the same way. Water from clear springs and water exposed to loving words shows brilliant, complex, and colourful snowflake patterns, he claims, while polluted water and water exposed to negative thoughts forms incomplete, asymmetrical patterns with dull colors. The Doctor finishes by suggesting that since people are 70 percent water, and the Earth is 70 percent water, we can heal ourselves and our planet by consciously expressing love and goodwill.

His assistants take a block of freezing water and write Hate on it. They take another, and write Love on it. Each block is analysed to see the crystal patterns formed. The one with Hate has irregular patterns; the one with Love flourishes symmetrically. Dr Otomo's plan is to put huge blocks of ice in the Hudson river with the word Love written on them all.

His experiment seems to work: It brings much excitement and happiness to New York. People begin to calm down on their commute. There is an increase in friendly body contact. While Tomas is happy for his neighbours and friends, who all behave as if they have won a small lottery, he is less content that ever.

Because his small riddle is unsolved. He knows that until he finds a copy of The Byzantine by John Goreman, a particular itch will remain unscratched. And this small fact horrifies him. It makes him think about all the other things he hasn't done: The novel he hasn't finished, the family he hasn't started, the girlfriends who are gone. The book from his dream represents all of the failures in his life. Finding it would give him some hope.

Except, of course, it may not exist.

He re-reads the opening lines of his abandoned novel:

Little houses run themselves round rags planted for me. Headbutt hearted-hands fly upward serenades, hard hallelujahs invoked. Suggested readings lost, paperbacks burned for heat. Pulp murders downwind roughen the geography, and terrors abound in lipstick dreamings. Mis-spelt yoofs dictate the pace of cities, none more so than the liberal playgrounds, where innocents can carry samurai swords into bookstores and drink coffoee with back-slaaping friends without fear of challenge. The lozenge of prayer smooths streetsleepers' words, ghosting their existences withpalpable routine and wonder.

His English metaphors and beatnik angst trouble him now. He wrote these lines when he was happier, and now he feels a burning worry, and cannot write. Lothar suggests that he take advantage of the new age of excitement and pick up a girl at a party, enjoy himself. At one, Tomas finds himself alone on the balcony when the host, a pretty young socialite named Sara (Sophie Marceau) comes out to talk. She asks him why he is down. He says that something is missing. She offers him a drink. He declines, as he's already had lots to drink. She says that she is very intrigued by him: Everyone else here is happy, but he is not. Tomas apologises, saying that he did not mean to insult the hostess. She tells him not to worry, as she is happy that he is not happy. She is not happy either, and the pretense is killing her. They laugh. She goes on to talk about her dreams, and how she keeps seeing an image of a basement in a house that she knows is in Bethlehem, Connecticut. Over and over, she sees this basement, sees this house, knows it is in Bethlehem, Connecticut, and knows it holds something important.

But she has never been to Bethlehem, Connecticut. She didn't even know that there was a Bethlehem in Connecticut until her dream prompted her to look for it.

Tomas is amazed, and talks about his own dream. Maybe your book is in my basement, Sara suggests, laughing. Tomas looks at her seriously. We should go and look for it. Sara laughs, and then sees how serious Tomas is. She shrugs her shoulders, takes him by the hand, runs through the party, finds the keys to her car, and they leave. They drive through the night to Bethlehem.

We see a montage of the pair driving, laughing, enjoying each other's company. One More Night as performed by Can plays over this sequence. This could be love, we think.

They arrive the next day, exhausted, but keen. Sara draws a picture of the house, and a local shopkeeper warily suggests they try the northern side of town, as there are several houses that look like her picture there. They do.

After a while, Sara points at a house. That's It! They stop the car, and Sara runs to knock on the door. There is no answer. She knocks again. No answer. Then she looks down, and sees a note under a stone. She glances back at Tomas, bites her lip, and picks up the note.

It says:

Gone to the city to see the ice. Key is in the usual place. J

It could be John, Tomas thinks. Sara impetuously walks round the back of the house, and by the time Tomas catches her, she is climbing through a back window. She gestures to him to stay outside and keep lookout. The camera stays with Tomas as he nervously waits. For four minutes, an unbroken shot follows him. As he fidgets, looks around, and hops on the spot, a single synthesised note slowly rises on the soundtrack, reaching a fuzzy crescendo. The anticipation threatens to burn through the celluloid.

And then Sara returns. Nothing there, she says breezily. Shall we get breakfast? Tomas stops her. There must be something there. She shakes her head. And it looks quite different to my dream. Oh well, lets eat and get to know each other. Maybe that's the real meaning of all this. She begins to walk to the car. Tomas looks after her, confused.

OK he says. They get in the car. I Am Waiting by the Rolling Stones plays once more.

Cut to Tomas' apartment, morning. The Stones are still on the radio. Tomas wakes.

The Byzantine Directed by Wim Wenders Produced by Don Guest, Anatole Dauman Written by Sam Shepard Starring Bruno Ganz, Sophie Marceau, Jurgen Prochnow 20th Century Fox Release Date France: May 1981, UK: Oct 1981, US: Nov 1981. Tagline: 'Who can choose between truth and happiness?'