Finding the genuine in modern film's rubble

When Ian Curtis, Joy Division's singer, hanged himself in 1980,he had just seen Werner Herzog's Stroszek. It probably had very little to do with Curtis' motivations. Then again, Stroszek is one painful, arid film.

Stroszek is a drunk who moves to America to escape the hopelessness of Germany. He sits around and refuses to work, so his girlfriend prostitutes herself for money, and soon leaves him. The bank repossesses everything he owns; he attempts a pathetic bank robbery, gets his friend arrested in the process, then kills himself with a shotgun on a ski lift while a chicken dances. That's it.

There is little pleasure in this movie, but even less that is compelling. Stroszek is sympathetic for a while, but once his terrible inertia really kicks in, it's disgusting how vile and pathetic he is. To him, America is indistinguishable from Germany. There is no language problem because he never listened to others to begin with. And Stroszek himself has absolutely nothing to say.

Stroszek is pain without catharsis, pressure without relief (well, except for death), but it seems completely genuine. Herzog cast schizophrenic Bruno S. as Stroszek, and the actor's own detachment from reality makes Stroszek's apathy towards life all the more disturbing. The verisimilitude almost compensates for the numbing stasis of the movie, but I still felt cheated.

But Herzog may have been right in admitting no answers, because so often the solutions are ludicrous. Fellow countryman Wim Wenders, a fine director, falls prey to embracing a sort of mystical salvation (see Paris, Texas) in order to redeem the world. I don't buy it. Krzysztof Kieslowski, in unlikely, beautiful juxtapositions, boldly steps right over the edge of reality and leaves the viewer with sweet-and-sour packages that do a good job of looking important. Wenders and Kieslowski have talent to burn, but both became confused while running from Herzog's insoluble fatalism with their tails between their legs.

More troubling is the case of Mike Leigh, whose new film Secrets and Lies won the Palme d'Or and broke the heart of critic after critic. Despite containing the same sense of British desolation expressed in his previous movies High Hopes and Life is Sweet, Leigh's new film descends into the same ambiguous mysticism that felled Wenders and Kieslowski. The quality of the acting and writing almost conceals the absolute contrivance of the main plot point, which concerns the return of the adopted Cynthia, an African-American, to her white mother. Leigh handles it as best he can, but Cynthia's character is nothing less and nothing more than a deus ex machina, and the ending of the film plays as such, lifting the audience's spirits while leaving the realm of the believable.

This stands in stark comparison to Leigh's last film, Naked, spiritual brother to Stroszek in its hopeless series of repetitive crises. Naked was the logical extreme of everything Leigh had portrayed in his films over the years: the misery caused by the class system, the attempt to find joy in the midst of crisis after crisis, and a creeping sense of pure futility. In Naked, the joy turned to hedonism, the misery to violence, and the futility to apocalypse. Secrets and Lies, in lightening the mood, reveals itself to be as hollow as a chocolate bunny.

What is it that makes Leigh's attempt to escape from Herzog's black hole so half-hearted? Leigh's message is not "This will save us" but merely "This will make things okay." Unfortunately, simply existing in an unconscious state of okay-ness is hardly enough to fight creeping nihilism. Secrets and Lies cons us into thinking that a small exorcism of feelings will change everyone's life for the better, which anyone who saw Naked knows is not only stupid, but unforgivably naive.

There is only one filmmaker in recent years who got away with openly disputing Herzog's cynicism, the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. Like Carl Dreyer, especially his Ordet, Tarkovsky is utterly sincere and open, and has no trouble dealing with big topics. While I have a special affection for the bizarre miracle/science-fiction story Stalker, Tarkovsky is most famous for his three-hour epic Andrei Rublev, the story of the medieval painter's crisis of faith due to the horrors that surround him. Midway through the film, when the Tartars swarm over the Russian landscape randomly killing, raping, and pillaging while a terrified Rublev fervently renounces art, the audience has to wonder exactly what makes Stroszek's life so miserable. When Rublev, spurred by a teenager's desperate attempt to construct a gigantic church bell, decides to return to painting, the audience has to wonder why Stroszek doesn't get off his ass and do something.

The answer is, Rublev finds a faith in art that will sustain him through utter barbarism, while Stroszek can't even find a reason to get up out of bed. Rublev's artistic crisis is really a spiritual one. The triumphant resolution is a barely disguised affirmation of faith. By his later films like The Sacrifice, the question is explicitly spiritual, and the answer positive. Like Andrei Rublev, Tarkovsky drew energy from his faith: his films are almost pantheistic in their treatment of scenery, drawing out a silent life force from everything on the screen. Devoid of any otherworldly hope, Herzog's films suck energy from all those involved, including the viewer.

Of course, for poor skeptics like myself, there's little to do but marvel at Tarkovsky's conviction. I imagine Leigh did the same, and couldn't find it in himself, so he settled for the worst possible alternative: he spat out pre-chewed, half-hearted consolations. The point is that, in the face of the absolute despair of Herzog, there is only one legitimate answer: unrealistic faith. But Leigh doesn't want to make any concessions: he wants his hope to be real and realistic, and the compromise is fatal. Feel-good movies have to be feel-fantastic; anything less and they're feel-stupid.

Herzog said, "A profound absence of pain is devastating for human beings." With nothing to fill that absence but false platitudes and small sentiment, Herzog still wasn't completely right. Only Tarkovsky's answer is complete and satisfying. Herzog's nihilism raised the stakes for what can be called "uplifting," so much so that anything short of the audience's absolute faith will always ring hollow.