Film Carew: 'Finding Vivian Maier', 'Two Days, One Night', 'Winter Sleep'

FINDING VIVIAN MAIER

The most beloved documentaries are those that live up to the old ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ saying. Finding Vivian Maier seems set to be instantly enshrined in those ranks; the story of its titular subject one worth telling, over again. Maier was a secretive, strange, single American nanny who spent the 20th century taking hundreds of thousands of Magnum-worthy street photographs, yet never showed them to anyone; her vast archives kept crammed into crazy-old-hoarder storage. John Maloof, out to find archival images to use for a history book on Chicago, bought a suitcase of negatives at an estate auction, and, then, once he saw the quality of her images, bought everything he could find. Unable to track down the photographer, it was only when he saw her obituary in a local newspaper that he was able to begin to shed light on a clandestine body-of-work, eventually unveiling it wild acclaim.

Maloof is one of the makers of the documentary; and, therein, he starts filming at the beginning, as a way of cataloguing and chronicling the treasured he’s uncovered. Finding Vivian Maier unfolds as he and co-director Charlie Siskel discover her work after her death. Its central figure remains a mystery; essentially unknowable, recounted by the few her knew her with conflicting testimony and effective hearsay. Where mass-media rushes to canonise the dead —and, so often, hagiographic dead-celebrity documentaries, especially those of artists, seek to make saints out of reprobates— the portrait of Maier, as person, that emerges is rarely flattering. She seems deeply troubled and deeply strange, yet remains forever out of reach; like the dead girl at the centre of a murder-mystery, a ghost that haunts the detectives (or documentarians) on the case, a cipher for whom others can channel their own grief, grievances, fantasies, desires, or doubts.

The story is so captivating, so magnetic, that many will compare it to the crowdpleasin’ mystery of Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching For Sugarman, but there’s echoes of other stranger-than-fiction documentaries: the rifling-through-the-remains narrative, filmmaking obsession, and existential eeriness recalling Carol Morley’s Dreams Of A Life; the broader discussion of outsider-artists, and private works made posthumously public, making for a natural thematic companion to In The Realms Of The Unreal: The Mystery Of Henry Darger. Like all those films, Finding Vivian Maier is entrancing to watch unfold, yet almost more fascinating to talk about; this a film whose tale will stay with you long after its credits roll.

TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT

Across the seven films since 1996’s La Promesse cemented their status as modern masters, Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have become cinema’s definitive socio-realists by, time and again, finding dramatic devices that humanise dire economic straits —downsizing, desperation, hardships— in profound morality plays. Their latest film, Two Days, One Night, has a premise that speaks exactly to that. Marion Cotillard plays a French factory worker who will be fired unless her fellow employees agree to forsake their annual bonuses. With their Sophie’s-choice vote scheduled for Monday morning, Cotillard spends the weekend (hence the title) visiting her co-workers —some friends, some foes— effectively pleading for her livelihood; there echoes of both charity-collecting and grassroots politics as she goes door-to-door, out to sign up enough sacrificial pledges to get her a ‘yes’ vote.

What unfolds is another unimpeachable portrait of the human face of the economic squeeze, but also a fascinating moral presentation of capitalist society’s constant struggle with individual gains vs shared collectivism; each of Cotillard’s co-workers handed, essentially, the socialist burden/ideal of personal sacrifice for shared greater good. Because cinema is a naturally empathetic medium —and, not to mention, because she’s a beautiful film-star— we’re instantly on Cotillard’s side: the audience immediately invited into the household whose mortgage her wage is repaying, into her domestic struggles with depression, into a marriage both supportive and slipping-away. Once we’ve seen her crying, it’s hard to remain neutral to her plight.

But the Dardennes are too smart, too sophisticated as dramatists to make Two Days, One Night a simple case of pitymongering, of workplace wrongs put right. As Cotillard goes from door-to-door —in the grimier reaches of a suburban nowhere— we meet a cast of characters (half played by non-professionals) just as singular, individual, and empathetic as her. Hicham Slaoui, for example, lives

with wife and newborn in a rundown tenement where the power routinely goes out, and does under-the-table cash-in-hand work at a local grocer on the weekends. To him, his bonus —€1000— is a year’s worth of gas and electric bills; worth more than Cotillard’s suffering. Each visited voter knows that their decision can’t be made in isolation: every one asks, first, how many —and who— are willing to sacrifice their bonuses. But, whether they weep in shame or attack in a rage, each character is afforded their own personal motivation, their own moral burden, their own agency. They are not pawns to be played in a game between Cotillard and her ‘rival’, taciturn foreman Olivier Gourmet (the Brothers’ old staple, in his seventh straight Dardennes film), but people with an impossible choice to make. All air their displeasure that this vote —this burden— has been left up to them, with all the guilt it’ll entail; they forced to wrestle with a responsibility usually left in the hands of the boss.

It’s a profound dramatic device that, in turn, confronts the audience watching it. In many ways, this is what the Brothers have been doing across their entire filmography, but Two Days, One Night makes it explicit: those watching their films complicit in a system that causes suffering for so many of its inhabitants.

WINTER SLEEP

You have to be a certain kind of cinemagoer to want to settle into 195 minutes of anything, let alone a glacial Turkish art-movie that spends its time eyeballs-deep in philosophical conversations on the nature of charity, the social responsibilities of the individual, and the limits of moral certainty. That’s what’s on the docket in Winter Sleep, a film whose title evokes what it’s like to witness: settling down for its endless shots of the snowy steppes feels like going into hibernation, leaving the cinema at the end like coming out bleary-eyed (and hungry!) into the light.

It’s the latest film for Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and, true to its running time, it takes so many of his particular obsessions —digital photography, marital discord, divisions of class, discussions on religion and society, the juxtaposition of cosmopolitan Istanbul with rural Anatolia— to new extremes. It’s his fifth consecutive film to receive an award at Cannes, but, this time, it was rewarded the Palme d’Or, the festival’s highest honour finally given, seemingly, for his devotion to his own Ceylan-ness, for remaining unwavering in his auteurism.

Ceylan practices a deeply-moral form of drama, and Winter Sleep is no different. Haluk Bilginer plays the privileged don of a rural community, born into a family of landowners; he the landlord to so many of the poor locals, the owner of a faux-rustic hotel that has both the authentic old-world Steppes aesthetic and wi-fi. With the daily work outsourced, he’s effectively an intellectual in his ivory tower; retreating to an office where he’s supposed to be working on a definitive history of Turkish theatre, yet where he spends most of his time devotedly tending to the morally-righteous opinion-piece columns he authors for a local newspaper. To his sardonic sister Demet Akbag, he’s a conversational foil, another member of the leisure-class happy to endlessly shoot the shit. To his estranged-under-the-same-roof wife (Melisa Sözen), he’s a contemptible figure: “an unbearable man” whose uses his virtues —education, rational reason, a devotion to ‘fairness’, morality clarity— to put himself above others.

Which is, of course, where Bilginer likes to be. As an ‘upstanding’ pillar of the region, he’s seduced by those who seek charity by flattering his ego, and is either too-soft or too-heartless on those tenants who’re unable to pay their rent; like Nejat Isler and Serhat Kiliç, brothers drunk and Godfearing, respectively, who must beg for forgiveness whilst barely concealing their resentment. Eventually, their debts lead to a dark moral-quandary steeped in both Chekhovian theatre and biblical parable, with its loaded class-conflict and burden-of-guilt echoing 2008’s Three Monkeys.

Winter Sleep is denser, richer, and more ambitious than Ceylan’s earlier films, yet it’s also less restrained, and far less taut; its loaded-silences no longer feeling like tension-mounting moments in a brooding thriller, but aimless pauses, exhaling ellipses between discursive philosophical discussions. The almost-as-long Once Upon A Time In Anatolia may’ve bordered on arthouse-crossover by using the police procedural to stage a dark meditation on the nature of storytelling, but here there’s nothing resembling familiar form, nothing to string an audience along. Fans of cinema at its most existential, expansive, ruminative, and drifting will be able to lovingly luxuriate in Winter Sleep’s ambling sprawl, but for so many viewers, the mere phrase “195-minutes of glacial Turkish art-movie” will serve as due warning.