The Discomfitting "Dark Matter"

I'm facing a difficult choice this morning: whether to go to the screening of Black White & Gray, James' Crump's documentary about the relationship between Robert Mapplethorpe and his curator/lover Sam Wagstaff, or Julian Schnabel's feature The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (which sounds even prettier in its French title, Le Scaphandre et le Papillon.) In the end, for logistical reasons, I choose The Diving Bell, though I think it will garner more mainstream press attention than the Crump documentary, which was well-reviewed when it screened at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Schnabel's third feature is adapted from a bestselling memoir of the same name by Jean-Dominique Bauby, published in 1998. Stories don't come much more intense than Bauby's: at 42, he was the editor-in-chief of French Elle, a decadent playboy, when he suffered a massive stroke that left him paralyzed on both sides of his body. A victim of an extremely rare condition called "locked-in syndrome," he was completely cognizant but unable to move beyond blinking his left eyelid.

For the first twenty minutes or so, Schnabel (who fought hard to make the film in French) presents the world from Bauby's point of view as he wakes up, terrified, in a provincial hospital. Lurching, half-focused visions fill the screen: curtains blow in the wind, a doctor's stubble looms inches from the camera. It's visceral, virtuosic filmmaking that conveys the horror of paralysis from the inside -- as shocking, in its own way, as the opening of Saving Private Ryan. Any possible pretentiousness of this stream-of-consciousness point of view is undercut by the guiding intelligence of Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), who offers wry commentary on everything he's (half) seeing. When, for example, two comely therapists lean over him, exposing their cleavage to his view, he wonders, "Am I in heaven now?"

Later, the film turns into a more conventional narrative of spiritual recovery, though "conventional" is a relative term for Schnabel (Basquiat, Before Night Falls), the former art world darling known for his broken crockery-encrusted paintings. Incredibly, Bauby wrote his book by blinking out letters with his one working eyelid, and the film manages to depict this process without becoming stultifyingly boring. What Amalric accomplishes with the use of a single eye is pretty amazing. It sounds hokey to say you'll come out of this movie grateful for every step you can take and word you can utter, but I'll say it anyway. Thanks to cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, the film is also ravishingly beautiful to look at.

The next movie on my slate, Shi-Zheng Chen's Dark Matter made me uncomfortable in a whole different way. This low-budget ($1 million) film starring Meryl Streep and Aidan Quinn is stuck in distribution limbo because of its subject matter, which involves a foreign student on an American campus committing an act of horrific violence. The film is extremely stylish, smartly-paced and well-acted -- so whence my discomfort? Well, it's not just that the narrative is profoundly sympathetic to anti-hero Liu Xing (Liu Ye), an earnest astrophysicist who gets screwed over by his self-regarding professor (Quinn) -- though this sympathy no doubt explains why a bidding war for the film evaporated after the Virginia Tech shootings. No, it's more that the presentation of the Chinese students – as graspingly materialistic math nerds – seems like an uncomfortable stereotype. In one scene, Liu and his friends attend a Bible study meeting, descending like buzzards on the snack table before they're supposed to, then admitting they're there only because the church offers Chinese students rides and free furniture. The scene is good for a laugh, but it seems like a cheap one at the expense of hardworking Chinese students everywhere.

In the post-screening Q&A, Quinn reported that China's Film Censorship Board has responded very positively to the movie, which initially made me think, "Huh?" Then I realized this made perfect sense: after all, the movie depicts an upright, brilliant Chinese student slowly driven crazy by the superficial, cutthroat nature of American society. Judging by the very positive audience reaction, though, nobody else seems to have shared my uneasiness, so hey, rent it on Netflix and judge for yourself. Which reminds me: Ted Sarandos of Netflix is receiving a well-deserved Trailblazer award at this year's festival for his contribution to getting more indie films in front of more eyeballs. Hip hip hurray.

I also saw Brett Morgen's very interesting documentary Chicago 10 this evening – but I'm going to save discussion for that until tomorrow's blog, which will be dedicated to documentary films.

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