A few months ago, I was taking a friend to see Abbas Kiarostami's Ten and he was surprised afterwards to find out that Kiarostami's film was playing in a theatre that was also showing Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. Actually, the image of the posters for Ten and Charlie's Angels hanging on the same wall is one of my favorite moments related to cinema this year. According to the laws that rule the film world nowadays, these two films shouldn't be allowed to even occupy the same space. But they happen to be two of the most rich film experiences this writer has had this year. So the fact that it seems impossible to talk about them together struck me as a shame.

According to most that was written about them, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle is a mindless big-budget romp and Ten a hard, minimalist look at women's oppression in Iran. There's certainly some truth in these descriptions, but they're far from being a comprehensive report of the experience of seeing them. Ten may be difficult, but it has a musical sense and an attentive eye for detail that also makes it frequently joyful. As for Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, I think it's a far more difficult film than it gets credit for, mostly because director McG seems to be working from a perspective that goes against many things we learn good filmmaking should be about. Both films made me adjust my aesthetic sensibilities many times as they went along. And although Ten is a film made almost without a director and McG's reputation is that of a Hollywood hack, they happen to be two very good guides about what it means to be an auteur at the multiplex and the arthouse.

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One thing that always amazes me is that, even with everything that was written on people like Hawks or Ford, many self-proclaimed auteurists have so little interest in contemporary commercial filmmaking. This is nothing new. Andrew Sarris's The American Cinema was already at its worst when dealing with filmmakers whose careers began in the late '50s or early '60s. Sometimes I got the impression that auteurism runs the risk of degenerating into mere nostalgia for old Hollywood (and '60s European) films, although things seem to have gotten better in the last few years. Still, the sense of laziness towards looking beneath what is being made in genre cinema, and trying to find what is vital, exists as clearly today as ever. The consequence of this is that many possibly interesting careers end up being interrupted by lack of support (Abel Ferrara's change from a low budget genre filmmaker to an arthouse one during the '90s is an interesting case study, even tough Ferrara is too gifted a filmmaker to pay attention to these sort of categories). Of course, we can't generalize and good writing on filmmakers working in non-prestige and more commercial films still exists, but filmmakers like John Carpenter and Clint Eastwood are still celebrated mostly in small specialized ghettos.

Looking at this year's crop of commercial Hollywood releases, two stand out as very good examples of an auteur working from inside the system: Ang Lee's Hulk and McG's Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (they aren't the only good ones; I happen to like Down with Love at least as much as them). Lee's film is a more obvious example of an auteur at work. It's not only a film by a respected filmmaker, but one done, by all accounts, with considerable freedom given to him and his usual screenwriter/producer James Schamus.

Like Lee's previous Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, it presented Lee with the challenge of working with the sort of material which attracts very passionate fans and at the same time trying to insert something of his own in them. As usual with Lee, the film has a sort of placid academicism (which seems more welcome in this comic book adaptation than usual) and he manages to insert some comic book touches in the editing that were as silly as effective, and made a graceful use of special effects (few times has the fakery of CGI been put to better use.) Even so, most of the time Lee seems to only be able to manage to turn Hulk into a personal film by going against viewer expectations. A good example of this, as a friend noticed, was how he shows the death of a small villain by freezing the montage in such way that all the pleasure the audience may have gotten from that character's death is gone. The shot looks terrible according to rules of good craftsmanship and I heard many complaints against this scene as further proof that Lee couldn't do this sort of big-budget filmmaking. But this sort of upset reaction was exactly what he was after.

Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle is a more effective film precisely because it blends its auteurist touches into the material far more smoothly. It even manages to take maximum advantage of the current trend of sequels which exaggerate everything that audiences liked in part one, since excess of all sorts have everything to do with McG's vision. It must be said that I doubt that McG sees himself as anything more than an entertainer and if Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle succeeds as a personal film it is more by the amalgam of a series of touches and the very particular taste that gives the material a peculiar sensibility.

McG is in a far different league than that of someone like John McTiernan or Richard Donner; he sees action from another perspective. A film like Terminator 3 (directed by Jonathan Mostow) has a clear preoccupation with establishing a plot, creating and developing characters, making distinct the spaces where the action takes place (even if it's all crude and simple). Nothing like this is done in Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. Here is a film that works with a space that is nearly incoherent and where the quick changes of locations (and the visual impact that comes from those quick changes) are far more important than is a need to explore them. And yet McG makes wonderful use of this strategy, creating a space/time relation that has nothing to do with any of the usual norms of probability, but from an idea of immediate meaning that exists in a constant flux according to how its characters experience whatever is happening on the screen. Many lazy critics write this film off as another by-the-numbers blockbuster, but truth be told, we never know what will happen in the next shot, even if after a while we start to expect something both silly and in bad taste.

The film's color palette is usually odd and somewhat ugly, as are the excessive costumes, but both are frequently used in very creative ways. Somewhere in the middle of Full Throttle, I ended up concluding that few directors since George Sidney have used bad taste so expressively as McG. In the same way, the film celebrates iconography (there's no spoofing here) as few pop artifacts have done before.

It also must be said that if McG celebrates his three lead characters and their lifestyles and seems to feel genuine warmth towards them, this is essentially a post-humanist film. At a certain point near the film's end, a weird looking supporting character played by Crispin Glover who has no function in the film (and an absurd characterization and back story) has a romantic innuendo with Drew Barrymore; the action stops for one second and this character is
cruelly killed. Then the action restarts like nothing happened. The scene may look like a cruel joke (and Grover seems to be in the film only for this sequence), but the truth is that this character really isn't seen as human being at all; he exists only as a body (and this is a film that turns human bodies into Warner Brothers cartoons like only Frank Tashlin and Joe Dante can, but without any of the warmth they also brought) and as a signifier. We may not like this or most of the other elements that McG brings to the film (like his complete lack of interest in conventional storytelling), but we can't put our backs to it either because there's something very particular about the sensibility at work here, something that doesn't seem to be an end in itself. Lee's Hulk is certainly a lot easier to like, but McG's film stuck me as a lot more successful and genuinely interesting; and it blends the very personal and the most shamefully commercial like few things to come out of Hollywood.

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"Creating some kind of conventional framework to express the conventional emotions of supposedly non-conventional characters who actually end up being more conventional than conventional."
--Olivier Assayas in Cinemascope #14

In Eric Hobsbawn's The Jazz Scene there's a curious remark about the avant-garde jazz musicians in the '50s. According to the historian, at the same time that they found the first real jazz audience (instead of an audience for a diluted form of jazz), the musicians got creatively trapped by it. After all, that audience wants to hear the jazz they like; that means the same standards over and over again.

I kept thinking about this commentary on '50s jazz almost every time I went to see a film at an arthouse theatre. It seems to me that it is time for us--cinephiles with an interest in contemporary cinema--to accept that the arthouse has worked for some time now as a market not at all different from the multiplexes (only the numbers are smaller). This is obviously true in the American "independent" scene, but it's as obvious (but far less noticed) in the European, Latin American and Asian cinema. As Olivier Assayas mentions, they may have a different sort of conventions, but they are conventions all the same, and most of them seem to have even less to do with any sort of personal expression or anything to do with our world.

Why is it so important to mention this here? Because most of this cinema is advertised to us as the work of auteurs and they seem to be made to give us the impression that they really are. This happens in many ways. One is in the work of veteran filmmakers who seem to have lost most of the interest they once had in the medium and are simply killing time. Theo Angepolous's Eternity and a Day is a perfect example of this. A film that seems to have been made so its director could finally get his Golden Palme at Cannes, one that tries to follow every rule in the book so as to be the perfect festival film, and one that at the end doesn't amount to anything outside of some pretty images (pictorialism for its own sake seems to be a favorite of this new arthouse cinema) and half-baked regurgitated ideas expressed without any conviction. Eternity and a Day seems to have created a new sort of academicism, one not that different than the one found in period adaptations. Something similar can be seen in many national cinemas which have become almost genres in themselves.

Michael Winterbottom may be the best case study of these. Here is a filmmaker who seems to be able to make a film about anything, one for whom there's no difference between a Thomas Hardy adaptation, a film about the Bosnian war, or the Manchester rock scene; it all amounts to a series of technical tricks (which he is pretty good at). Winterbottom is really the star of all his films, but he seems completely unable to express anything but the impression of expressing something. If there's anyone making really dead films today, it's him. Even the most inept Hollywood film is more honest than him. But that doesn't seem to be important as he has already had two films in major film festivals this year, and will probably have another two next year.

And how does Ten relate to all of this? Abbas Kiarostami is one of our greatest auteurs and what he is doing in this film is a lot more interesting than most articles about it make it look to be. In the context of auteurism-as-advertising label, comes Ten. Let's take a look at it. We are dealing with a film where almost everything we immediately associate with Kiarostami is gone (for starters, unlike most of Kiarostami's well-known films, it has none of the usual wonderful shots, the geography it covers is far less beautiful, and the Iranian middle class it shows has little of the exoticism that attracts many Western viewers). But if "Kiarostami" is gone (or at least the Kiarostami that seems to exist for many), why does Ten seem so obviously the work of its auteur? Why did it strike me as the logical next step in an already brilliant career?

I kept thinking after seeing Ten for the first time (in a film festival that was full of films that were desperate trying to look like they've been made by future great auteurs), that the most radical thing Kiarostami was doing was to show us how so much of cinema has nothing more than a supposedly attractive surface. Ten has none of the superficial things that we link first to this very gifted filmmaker, but it paradoxically seems like the distillate essence of his cinema (the only other example of this that came to my mind is Welles' F for Fake). All of Kiarostami's preoccupations--about how to capture the world, how to present his subject, the relationship between fiction and non-fiction, the ethical position of the filmmaker--are there, aesthetically expressed.

Anyone can make a film that shows only a black screen like Joao Cesar Monteiro's wonderful Snow White, but this will only have a real effect on us if it's tied to an intensity on the part of the filmmaker; take that out and what you have is only one big trick (a great marketing ploy for sure, but it can't sustain a movie.). Likewise, Ten is a very easy film to copy, but it belongs to Kiarostami and only Kiarostami. By exterminating the auteur, Kiarostami only restores its importance.

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Coming back to the image that started this article--the posters for Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle and Ten hanging on the same wall--we are left with two vital films that still exist in different worlds. If someone asks me what good auteurist criticism should be doing today, I'd say it should be bringing these worlds closer together. Both films deserve a second thought; they shouldn't be simply written off or admired at a distance. They deserve better than that.

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002