BLUE RUIN (Jeremy Saulnier, 2014, USA)

One man transposes retribution for justice in order to silence the demons that have driven him to the fringes of society. He learns that only Death is the great equalizer. Director Jeremy Saulnier strips the revenge motif down to its basic core concept, exploding genre motifs and allowing us insight into the protagonist’s slow descent into ruin.

The film begins with a disheveled man bathing in a tub: his beard and hair are tangled and unkempt. The bathroom looks perfectly nice middle class and the disparity seems a bit unsettling. It’s not until the scene cuts to a family coming home and the man jumping out of the tub and through the bathroom window that we realize he had broken in. This is how we meet Dwight. Saulnier lazily follows Dwight through his routine of sleeping in his rusted blue car by the beach, eating out of trash bins, and resting under the boardwalk. When a police cruiser stops by his parked car we expect him to be arrested for Trespass but Saulnier has another surprise for us. With a gentle voice the officer wakes him and asks Dwight to come with her. She takes him back to the station not to arrest him or interview (as Dwight suspects) but to let him know that the man who murdered his parents just finished serving his prison sentence and was released.

Dwight’s journey of self-destruction began twenty years ago with the crime. Saulnier lets the rusted blue car stand as a metaphor for Dwight: it’s in such bad condition that it surprises us when it actually starts! It may be dead on the outside but it can run just a little while longer, perhaps to complete one final task.  And it does. But it’s final task is not to kill (unlike Dwight) but to save.

Yet Saulnier doesn’t amp up the adrenaline to unbelievable proportions as in typical thrillers but allows Dwight move and breath at his own pace. The characters are realistically proportioned and look like real people and not the steroid infused bodybuilders that flaunt Hollywood action thrillers (another convention turned upside-down). Information isn't given in static exposition but discovered in pointed conversation, revealed almost casually and without exclamation point! We know this man Wade Cleland murdered Dwight’s parents but we don’t know why. In the first truly tense scene Dwight follows Wade and his family from prison to a dingy bar. Dwight sneaks in and hides in the bathroom. Instead of some lengthy confrontation with excuses and apologies, Dwight attacks viciously with a knife and stabs him to death. The scene is brutally realistic and over very quick. Saulnier shows the spurting arterial spray as Wade slowly and violently concedes his life. But now a war has begun between Dwight and the Cleland Clan putting Dwight's sister and her children at risk.

The confrontation between Dwight and the surviving Cleland family consumes the final two acts with a dehumanizing slow motion fury. From Dwight being shot in the leg with a crossbow bolt (and attempt to pull it out with pliers) to his kidnapping of Wade’s brother and this man's subsequent brain-splattering death (because that's what bullets do)murder has become contagious like the Bubonic Plague or Ebola. Isolation is the key to recovery and the final act ends in a distant lonely house owned by the Clelands. Dwight’s friend advises him earlier to shut up and shoot, no monologue or you’re dead as this isn’t a movie. But Dwight is fractured and broken and forgets his friend’s plea.

The truth is revealed and Dwight understands that Wade didn’t kill his parents: Wade’s father consummated the dead and his son Wade confessed and did the time. Dwight now wants the killing to stop but it’s too late. Shadows paint the wall like ghosts, formed by the muzzle flashes as the final gunfight leaves all but one dead: the youngest Cleland…who is just the right age. Dwight lets his half-brother live and mutters through a mouthful of blood, a mantra (or prayer)that hopefully saves this young man to leave  vengeance behind and to live a better life. The blue ruin has completed its final task.

“The keys are in the car….”

Final Grade: (A) 

L’IMMORTELLE (Alain Robe-Grillet, 1963, France)

A nameless French man haunts the mazes of his own memory reliving and experiencing the same trauma repeatedly. Istanbul becomes his purgatory where the ancient crumbling structures are like bleached bones of some mythical beast and the language a secret code he is unable to decipher. For him, there seems no escape as even death brings the cycle full-circle once again.

Alain Robe-Grillet creates the same ambivalence and erotic mystery as his classic LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD which was directed by Alain Resnais from very detailed shooting script. Robe-Grillet included specific instructions concerning camera movement, framing and editing. Once again, Robe-Grillet elevates Form over Substance as the mystical power of L’IMMORTELLE is not in understanding and connecting narrative links but in being immersed into the way it is told. The film begins with a long tracking shot of jagged ruins partially buried in the hillside. It is obvious that the shot is taken from a car as it speeds along a flat road. The opening credits are superimposed over this scene. As the credits sequence ends we hear the disparate sound of squealing tires and crashing metal; it’s as if the car we’re riding in as the POV crashes! Yet, there is no gimmicky camerawork to sustain this POV so it’s possibly another car crashing off camera. Without explanation we cut to a man without introduction, standing in a darkened room and looking through the wooden slats of a window as if he doesn’t want to be seen. Below is an older man sitting on a chair by the seaside. Suddenly, a beautiful woman’s face then interrupts this viewpoint through the slats. It’s an impossible physical image so it must be a dream or memory belonging to this nameless man. She stares at the camera (or man) and a playful smile dances across her lips. This is the beginning of a tale that cannot be explained, a mystery that cannot be solved but a visual adventure worth undertaking nonetheless.

L’IMMORTELLE is a beautiful film like a dream captured on celluloid in stark black and white detail. Robe-Grillet often crosses the axis and creates a disorienting spatial relationship between characters and the audience. He often utilizes a slow 180 pan with a character on the far left and as the camera moves slowly right the same person shows up on the far right, engaged in another conversation or behavior. Grillet also cuts scenes so it looks as if a character is crossing the room only to meet himself sitting or lying in bed. Often, small details have changed such as the drawing of a tulip pasted to the wall or the lighting has dimmed, conveying a possible change in time but not place. We also experience, like the nameless protagonist, the same actions and conversations but from different perspectives; Grillet often changes some small barely noticeable detail from each angle; it’s as if Grillet is showing the malleability and the impermanence of memory. Characters also physically disappear from scene to scene and sometimes contradicting the same temporal continuity.

The story is open to interpretation and is quite possibly meaningless. I believe that our nameless protagonist N is a ghost wandering back to the last few places he visited in his brief life: N is not aware that he is dead. He interacts with an exotic woman and other benign and sometimes weirdly stoic people who are also ghosts trying to show N that he has passed. Here people stop and stand silent as he passes as if life has become still as the grave, turning in his direction as he wanders past. He seems oblivious or at least unconcerned about this strange behavior. N is immersed in himself, his ego keeping him from “passing on”. Like JACOB’S LADDER years later, the people can seem cruel or kind depending on your perspective. Here, Istanbul is an ancient crumbling city full of ghosts.

L’IMMORTELLE is not a film for everyone. It’s a film for cinephiles, for people who love the style and Form of movie-making, and for those who see film as contemplative and sometimes rebellious. Alain Robe-Grillet has transmuted the dream-world into a physical reality to view…but something is always lost in transubstantiation.

Final Grade: (A)