When the City Steals the Show
By GRAHAM FULLER
IT'S home sweet home this movie season for some, but not all, directors who have their eyes fixed on city life. In "Bringing Out the Dead," Martin Scorsese depicts Manhattan as an update on Pandaemonium -- the capital of hell in Milton's "Paradise Lost" -- as he did in "Taxi Driver." In one bravura nighttime shot, filmed from the perspective of an ambulance driver (Nicolas Cage) losing his grip on reality, Scorsese turned the camera over to give the impression of what it's like to career sideways down Ninth Avenue, "unbalanced" being the requisite point of view.
In "Liberty Heights," Barry Levinson peers back with bittersweet nostalgia at the Baltimore of the 1950's, as he did in his first feature, "Diner." Even as it says good riddance to racial segregation, the new film laments the passing of a world in which burlesque shows were havens for lonely men and a Jewish paterfamilias might slip out of the synagogue on Rosh Hashana for a private showing of the latest Cadillac.
These directors are on safe territory, even if Scorsese's Manhattan is more luridly dystopic than ever. Woody Allen, until recently that least movable of Manhattanites, has meanwhile taken a road trip. Having allowed himself to be filmed touring Europe with his jazz combo in the 1998 documentary "Wild Man Blues," Allen has now made the shaggy-dog story "Sweet and Lowdown," which gads about America in the company of a self-deluding jazz guitarist (Sean Penn). The movie visits New York briefly, but the city is not the centripetal force it has been in a majority of Allen's pictures since "Annie Hall" (1977).
The directorial profession is wide enough to encompass wanderers and regionalists, pastoralists and city rats. "We're all gypsies," the nomadic David Lean said in a 1985 interview, but some directors repeatedly gravitate toward their old metropolitan haunts, even if most eventually range beyond them.
Spike Lee, Hal Hartley and Abel Ferrara are other directors proffering radically opposed visions of New York. John Waters presents a camp alternative to Levinson's Baltimore and Gus Van Sant a poetic Portland, Ore., Further afield, there is Pedro Almodóvar's melodramatic Madrid, Terence Davies's working-class Liverpool and Wong-kar Wai's kinetic Hong Kong. In the past, there was René Clair's studio-rendered Paris; Marcel Pagnol's Marseilles of boule, pastis and the waterfront; Federico Fellini's circuslike Rome and Yasujiro Ozu's middle-class Tokyo.
Some film cities are best represented by one or two indelible visions: Carol Reed's labyrinthine postwar Vienna in "The Third Man"; Alfred Hitchcock's dreamy, deceptively manicured San Francisco in "Vertigo"; Francis Ford Coppola's illusory Las Vegas in "One From the Heart" and Mike Figgis's Stygian equivalent in "Leaving Las Vegas"; Volker Schlöndorff's Beirut of political and sexual treachery in "Circle of Deceit" and Ziad Doueri's version of the same wartorn city in the recent "West Beirut"; Goran Paskaljevic's necropolitan Belgrade in "The Powder Keg," and Wim Wenders's celestial Berlin in "Wings of Desire."
M R. WENDERS is modern cinema's ultimate global citizen, as promiscuously cosmopolitan as Woody Allen is supposedly a one-city guy. Defying the conventional wisdom that a film should be set in a single arena, Wenders originally planned to shoot his 1991 science-fiction road movie "Until the End of the World" in 28 cities in 17 countries. (He eventually settled for seven cities and the Australian outback.) His films consistently grapple with how the here-and-now of cities like Berlin, Tokyo, Lisbon and Los Angeles interact with their pasts, and how that confluence affects their denizens. "In many respects, cities have their own character," he said in 1989, "so for me they become like having another star actor in a film."
"Wings of Desire" (1988), which represented a spiritual homecoming for Wenders after seven years of voluntary exile in America, is his quest for the soul of Berlin and, by extension, what remained of the German soul four decades after the war. It follows the fortunes of two unemployed guardian angels as they glide down to Berlin's autobahns and subways, its apartments and the wastelands by the wall, where they tune in to the innermost anxieties of the city's fretting populace.
As bound up as we are in the angels' desire to become mortal, they are primarily conduits for a metaphysical meditation on the film's mutating central character: Berlin itself. There is the sense that the city is itself telling the story and, as Wenders has suggested, that the citizens observed by the angels do not live in Berlin as much as Berlin lives in them. By the end of this remarkable film and its weaker 1993 sequel, "Faraway, So Close," even the angels have been absorbed into the city.
Wenders has spoken tenderly of the stretches of wasteland shown in "Wings of Desire," some of which the film memorialized before they were turned into formal gardens. He was expressing that a city's history is told as much by the gaps between buildings as by its architecture.
Mike Leigh has also made significant use of forgotten tracts of land, as well as the gaps between buildings, to staggering effect.
Although Leigh is celebrated for his anthropologically based satires with their acid and compassionate observations of British manners, the visual fabric of his films is frequently neglected. Yet no one else has done as much to put contemporary London and its class divisions on the screen in the last 20 years, and certainly not with his deep understanding of how its physical and emotional topography are one and the same.
A grandchild of Jules Dassin's "Night and the City" (1950), Leigh's "Naked" follows the rake's progress of Johnny (David Thewlis), an overly articulate 30-ish Northerner burdened with existential angst, who rambles nocturnally through London's labyrinths in a doomed attempt to penetrate his own addled psyche. Like film noir heroes, he is guided by women, the usual crop of deadly Circes and benevolent Beatrices. He treats them cruelly or kindly, according to his whim. He buys one of them, a homeless Scottish lass separated from her boyfriend, a consoling cup of tea. But then the boyfriend turns up and begins kicking her. Instead of protecting her, Johnny wheels away in a single forlorn movement on the piece of empty ground on which he is standing. Where is he? Surely there are no bomb sites left in London. The empty space Johnny is occupying is, of course, the void between people, their failure to connect.
In Leigh's latest film, "Topsy- Turvy," set in London in 1884 and shot mostly in interiors, the librettist W. S. Gilbert (Jim Broadbent) leaves the theater where his and Arthur Sullivan's "Mikado" is about to open. Lurching down an alley, he is clawed at and propositioned by several wretched women. Whatever this nightmarish interlude tells us about Gilbert's inner turmoil, this dab of Dickens puts into a social context the rarefied world of theatrical artifice in which the film is unfolding; it is Leigh's reminder to the audience that there is a grim reality beyond the world of make-believe.
The sequence mirrors the opening of "Naked," in which Johnny angrily copulates with a woman in a Manchester alleyway. But the film remains there only for the time it takes him to abandon her and head for London. Leigh, who has not made an entire film outside London since he went to Belfast for "Four Days in July" (1984), exults in London's places -- dark and light -- and its people, and he relishes probing (and sometimes filling) the gaps between them. It is hard to imagine London, dour and sluggish as it is beyond its center, getting to him in the same way Manhattan's supercaffeinated energy appears to have done recently -- superficially, at least -- to its cinematic champion.
Woody Allen has been escaping New York a lot lately. "Mighty Aphrodite" took flights of fancy to ancient Greece and "Everyone Says I Love You" to Venice and Paris. "Deconstructing Harry" culminated in a desperate flight upstate, making a quick detour to hell en route. Allen's "Celebrity" sent its main character on a humiliating side trip to Atlantic City, and the Manhattan it showed was a treacherous black-and-white film noir city, its slick, shimmering streets redolent of those in Alexander Mackendrick's "Sweet Smell of Success," the most baleful image of Manhattan on film.
Eighteen years before "Celebrity," Allen filmed "Manhattan," in black and white. Its evocative opening sequence is a montage of lambently photographed vistas, galvanizingly scored to "Rhapsody in Blue" with Allen contributing a voice-over paean to the city. Although that film, like "Celebrity," was the story of a self-deceiving writer led astray by the wrong woman , it revealed Allen's inviolable love of New York at that time.
Now, we're not sure what the artist in him thinks of the city. But New York is a habit he can't break. Not one scene of "Sweet and Lowdown" was shot more than an hour outside Manhattan. And when he learned I was writing this article, he passed on the message that he one day hopes to shoot an out-and-out Western without leaving Manhattan at all.
It's almost a relief to find Allen exploring what passes for Chicago, Los Angeles and the American hinterland in "Sweet and Lowdown," which has delightful scenes in provincial speak-easies, at a rural gas station, on a Hollywood set, and on a New Jersey boardwalk where you can feel the breeze. The film is more relaxed than anything else Allen has made in the 90's. He should get out of New York more often -- maybe go on a safari to Pennsylvania.
Scorsese exhibits a less ambiguous relationship with New York. Ever since he recreated Lower East Side street life in "Who's That Knocking at My Door?" (1968), he has reveled in depicting the most depraved, squalid and dehumanizing aspects of the city. Scorsese's city of earthly degradations embraces the infested 42nd Street of "Taxi Driver," the fetid animal pen that is the Bronx of "Raging Bull," the claustrophobic SoHo loft world of "After Hours," the nouveau riche Mafia enclaves of East Brooklyn in "Goodfellas," the mansions of malice in the 19th-century Upper East Side of "The Age of Innocence" and now Hell's Kitchen in "Bringing Out the Dead."
T HIS is a New York that throbs with physical and emotional violence yet is never less than beautiful -- in the same way that nightmares can be beautiful, and Goya's paintings and Edgar Allan Poe's short stories. In the most startling image in "Bringing Out the Dead," a drug dealer impaled on a railing hangs off a balcony hundreds of feet above the city. It's an atrocity, but we cannot help admiring the view, a field of black velvet studded with jewels. The shot grows intrinsically out of the story, just one image in a phantasmagoria that provokes Cage's character to rescue a comatose patient's daughter as he travels through the bloody, garbage-heaped canyons.
The Manhattan of "Eyes Wide Shut," that other recent fable of a medical man seeking women to save or seduce on the island of lost souls, was, by contrast, passive. Stanley Kubrick's direction never transcended the distinct Old Europeanness of the source novella, as was evident in the film's sets of a Greenwich Village that resembles the real place but lacks its Eurotrashy bohemianism. Irrespective of its flora and fauna, the dramatic milieu Kubrick created was tangential to the film's forward action.
In all these movies, the city is more than mere backdrop; it is the hero's adversary, of which the siren, the damsel in distress, the opponent (pimp, crime lord, drug dealer, socialite), even the mother who appears as a hectoring giantess on the Manhattan skyline in Woody Allen's segment of "New York Stories," are mere operatives. They -- the people, whether flesh or fantasy -- embody the cities that issue them like genies. And perhaps the most authentic film city of all is the most genielike: the mirage of Las Vegas in "One From the Heart," which in its sublime studio artifice replicates the real Vegas better than any documentary could.
In the end, though, all film cities, made not of concrete and steel and blood and bone but of moments of time that have already passed, are phantoms -- projections of those fears and desires that each of us carries onto the real mean streets every day.
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