Old as all time

How do you compose a film out of a single human face? In I've Loved You So Long, my guess is that the face came first, then the movie. Kristen Scott Thomas's face looks like it was carved out of stone with a blunt knife, then weathered for a time longer than that of natural human existence. It is so striking that it interrupts every scene in the first half without doing anything, and seems to provide frictive counterpoint to the lives around her - they are drawn into the deep recesses of her cheeks, the strong bone of her brow, her secret past. The camera knows this and stays close, allowing her gargoyle-like features to fill our vision, so that it is hard for us to see much else. A moment of wonder: in a montage of family scenes that show the beginning of a process of healing, her face is no longer central, but is simply one of many in the backdrop of a circling crowd. The memory of pain never disappears - but it can be overcome, and momentarily forgotten, by an outpouring of joy.

The face is not a symbol in the movie, or a part of it - it is the movie. It begins in the high, narrow arch of the nose, and splays outward in either direction across vast cheeks, pushing the pallid, sunken skin to its farthest point at the edges of the eyes. Looking at Thomas makes you realize that there must be something in our faces that holds the eyes, nose, mouth in close proximity, in more or less fixed distance from each other, because she lacks it. Her features spill out, barely contained by the edges of her face. Contrast this with her sister, aquiline, narrow, small. They look so much like sisters, not because they are the same, but because they together complete a universe.

You can see every day lived in the collective vision of a face, and though you may try to dissemble, your face will reveal what you yourself do not know to the most piercing gaze. When the face is this striking, you can only wonder at the life that passed before it, what it exacted and what it left in its ruin.

Playing Favourites

I have always hated the question "What's your favourite _____??" I find it reductive and meaningless. Reductive, because it reduces what might be complex and multi-faceted thoughts about a work of art to a single priority; meaningless because it tells you nothing. If I tell you that Hedda Gabler is my favourite play, what does that tell you about me? About Hedda Gabler?

I usually answer the question, though, mostly because I love to sing the praises of things that I value. For instance, under "Favourite Music" on my Facebook I have the late Beethoven string quartets and sonatas, just because I think it would be a deep tragedy if anyone were to die without really encountering these works. Here, my answer is more of a precaution than anything - it's a warning to others, more than a statement for myself. But one thing that I do enjoy without too much anxiety is making lists of movies. In comparison to music or novels, movies are simpler - but not without their problems.

Asked to make a list of my favourite movies, I might offer something like this:

12 Angry Men
Amadeus
Fargo
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood
Pan's Labyrinth

These are movies that aspire to greatness and achieve it. They share other similar traits; for instance, they all present unique and clearly drawn ideologies that are masterfully realized, a vision of the world that is penetrating and devastating. And most of all, they fill me with that indescribable feeling that comes in the presence of greatness. It is a completeness, a wholeness, a sense of being in touch with a current of human thought normally inaccessible to us, hidden above the clouds.

But asked the same question, the next list would be equally valid:

The Devil Wears Prada
Legally Blonde
Little Miss Sunshine
You've Got Mail

These are movies I can re-watch endlessly and never get sick of - and isn't that in some sense the best way to understand "favourite"? A standby you can pick up at any time? Movies such as Fargo and No Country For Old Men I can only watch maybe once every six months, at most. Fargo I find especially difficult to watch; something about it leaves me deeply unsettled, even though I love it and prize it.

I considered all of this when I was filling out my Facebook info (yes, this is important to me). Neither of the above lists satisfied me; the first seemed too impersonal, too arbitrary (I could probably think of many more great movies I have seen that have affected me in the same way), while the second seemed to convey nothing of my aesthetic, what I find important in art.

The list I finally decided upon was, sadly, unusable, because it contained only two items:

Into the Wild
Shopgirl

But this list is the only one of the three that satisfies my criteria. 1) It is based on a coherent value system, and includes all movies within that system. 2) The list is a personal one; it says something about me.

Into the Wild and Shopgirl are two movies that have shaken me to my core. They are not necessarily "perfect" movies in the way that the greats above are - Shopgirl in particular has its flaws. But they are probably the two movies that are most important to me, because I identify with them on an emotional level that far exceeds anything I have experienced with any other movie. Even though I am in many ways unlike them, I am also fundamentally exactly like Alexander Supertramp in Wild or Mirabelle and Ray in Shopgirl. They absorb me completely, and when their characters suffer the final blow, I too become lost.

The list that appears on my Facebook looks like this, though it will probably change:

12 Angry Men
Adaptation
Amadeus
Into the Wild
Magnolia
Shopgirl

Which is really an amalgam of several different lists. But it's the best I can approximate. Ideally, as the years pass I will be able to find more films that shatter me as completely as Wild and Shopgirl have, and then I will have a real list, one that can stand on its own. Say, five items or more? I don't think that's too much to ask.