Magnetic Fields - Distortion (2008)

What is wrong with this album? I'd like to label it another scantily portioned conceptual failure, on the same level as 2004's equally shoddy i, but I can't just leave it at that. The problems go deeper. The good parts, however, are better, and this leaves Distortion as more inherently flawed but also more interesting.

i failed at a basic level because its theme was so arbitrary (14 songs all beginning with the same letter!) and pointless. Maybe, following the sucess of 69 Love Songs, Merritt was making a backhanded comment of the impotence of concept albums themselves, but the songs were so anemic that it didn't matter either way. The only passable material seemed cropped straight from 69, the rest was fey baroque trash lacking most of the humor Merritt needs so badly to temper his usual melancholy.

Distortion's concept doesn't fail so totally, but it's not very good either. Basically it's a thick varnish of shoegaze fuzz, with guitar and twinkling piano floating in space behind the static line of Merrit's bassy voice. It seems a shame at first, like the opaque sheen of the production is blocking some kind of brilliance inside, but this really isn't the case. This is a gelatin mold in which a mediocre album is trapped.

Case in point: "California Girls." The album's first vocal track takes ridiculous shots at the title girls ("looking down their perfect noses / at me and my kind") on its way to an intensely stupid revenge fantasy. Is this supposed to be clever? Me and my kind? This speaks of some bitter, sophomoric victimization fetish and Merritt sounds like a teenager commisserating with the rest of the drama clique. It's a shame, because his songs really click when their bitterness is reflexively aware of itself, turning the joke around on itself. This is just empty whining at the most obvious of targets.

Again, I'll concede that maybe the lyrics are working on some ironic plane that I cannot comprehend, but it's nearly impossible to tell, mired as they are in this bowl of pea soup and sung by frequent contributor Claudia Gonson, whose voice is as flat as Merritt's without any of the wry knowingness.

John Cassavetes - Shadows (1958)

There’s an ugliness to Shadows that can’t be explained by inexperience or aging film or low production values. It’s a challenging design, one of grit and in-your-face truth, and it’s shocking at first, especially compared with the meticulous staging of most films of this era. Ultimately, it’s rewarding. This is Cassavetes’ first film, and also the first genuine ‘independent’ film, at least by today’s definition of the term. This kind of incipiency only amplifies the film’s slapdash appeal, turning it into the stuff of legend. Many of the offbeat conventions that indie (for better or worse) has come to hold so dear can be traced back to here in some sense – location shooting (on streets and in cramped apartments), semi-improvised dialogue, naturally stilted acting. The ugliness is self-evident, even proud. The opening scene, at a raucous basement club show, is willfully shambolic, clearly more concerned with depicting the atmosphere of the room than framing it in any conventional sense. The camera jumps, the crowd surges in an out of the frame, the soundtrack doesn’t match the music being performed. It’s amateur stuff, but it’s also a willful challenge to cinematic convention, right down to the quavering appearance of the title card over the shot.

The first character we focus on is Ben, a sullen hipster with bug-eye sunglasses who stumbles into the scene. He comes off like James Dean without most of the good looks, and this stylization appears intentional on his part, especially in the dramatic entrance. He climbs up above the crowd, crouching alone on a table-top and indulging himself in a miniature existential freak-out

The reference point seems clearly to be Rebel without a Cause, but it also becomes clear that it’s not Cassavetes who’s referencing this as much as Ben himself. A good third of Shadows (Ben’s segments, this is a family drama, the rest of the action is devoted to his sister and brother) works on the same themes of alienation and angst the Nicholas Ray presented in that film. But while Ray drew out these feelings into melodramatic bursts of suburban hellfire dripping with Technicolor, Cassavetes presents another direct challenge to the establishment. Again, the ugliness. It’s everywhere, the filthy downtown streets, the greasy spoon diners, the concert halls. Cassavetes indulges in it, just like Ben indulges himself in the Dean character, which works to instantly identify his measured faux-badass persona. Note that one of these is the definition of realism, the other the definition of fallacy.

Cause or not, Ben and his friends are not rebels as much as creepy hepcats and small time hustlers. They mostly act like jerks, preying on women, mocking sculptures at the MOMA, getting into fights, swatting at pigeons (see above). It’s refreshing that Cassavetes, working with a cast on the fringes, does not take this as a cue to unleash the holy torment of society’s woeful misfits. Ben’s rebellions are stupid. They are explained and sourced, so we can feel for the character behind them, but they’re rash and immature, and, like the actions of the overzealous young people Godard (who was working off his own Ray obsession) was creating at the time, are embarrassingly shaped by the expectations of modern cinematic clichés.

I’ve already mentioned Cassavetes’ taste for confrontation with the establishment. He makes direct reference to it throughout the movie, posing his characters directly in front of marquees and posters that slyly comment on the action. As Leila, Ben’s sister, faces off with a grasping stalker, she is surrounded by pouty shots of Bardot in And God Created Woman and other sex romps. Hugh, Ben’s brother, contemplates a potentially devastating career decision like so:

What is Cassavetes saying here? Is he trying out the idea that cinematic conventions have intruded so far into everyday life that they influence these characters without their even realizing? I think that’s close, but not exactly it, especially because Ben is the only character who seems directly influenced in this way. I think that this is a double point, about the outsiders this film portrays (who in some ways stand for the film itself) who despite their fringe status still find themselves effected and peered over by society’s rules and mores. They are outside society, but not separate from it, an idea reinforced by Cassavetes’ tenuous love-hate relationship with his cinematic forebears.

Of course, the discussion of Ben’s family brings up the one huge issue I haven’t touched on – race. This is a film about outsiders and it uses race as a driving point for this topic, confronting it in frank and realistic terms, more so than any film I’ve seen up to its point in history. The three siblings are a multiracial family; they have no visible parents and live together in one apartment.

The idea here is that we have three siblings and three colors. Hugh appears to be black. Leila appears to be white. Ben looks like he’s somewhere in between. These differences in shade greatly alter their characters and their destinies, effectively settling each of them into a specific role in their lives and in the film.

Here we see that the overbearing confluence of fantasy and reality doesn’t only intersect in Ben’s rebellions. It also persists in his siblings lives, resulting in an air of failed attempts and unrealistic expectations. Hugh wants to be famous, or at least respected, but he won’t be, his career is going nowhere and only his manager takes him seriously.

There is an especially heartbreaking scene where the initial embarrassment of having to introduce a dance act gives way to a much larger one. Hugh, still thinking of himself as an artist, refuses to do the introduction at first, but eventually agrees, taking the whole thing in stride, even coming up with a few jokes to tell the audience. His performance, however, is cut short to appease a visibly bored audience. He segues into the introduction but is shouted down by the manager, left standing dumbfounded on the stage

Leila’s tragedy is a little more subtle. She wants to be white, but as much as she appears to be, she never will. The idea that she cannot escape the tendrils of society becomes clear when Tony, her new boyfriend, meets Hugh. He is visibly horrified, shocked to discover this fact about her, and although he is quickly apologetic Hugh does not give him the chance to correct his mistake.

It’s clear that this is partially Leila’s fault. By not telling him she is either being willfully deceitful or living under the assumed fantasy that race doesn’t matter in their little Greenwich village enclave of musicians and intellectuals. It does. As much as Greenwich is a world in itself around this time, it cannot exist separately from the conventions of society. It’s her deceit then, paired with society’s rules, that splits the two apart, even as Tony struggles to apologize. Leila even agrees, after much trepidation, to a date with a black acquaintance.

Despite his status as the blackest (and therefore most marginalized) character, Hugh is the anchor of the family and the only solid force we meet. His race is an obstacle, but it has made him stronger. He’s comfortable with himself. His brother and sister, on the other hand, are intensely uncomfortable with the drop of blackness that haunts their white features. Ben throws a ridiculous fit when a black girl makes advances at him, swinging at her and anyone who tries to restrain him. It’s as if even the suggestion of his hidden blackness is enough to drive him crazy.

The date that Leila goes on sees her struggling repeatedly with the fact that she is not entirely white. It’s as if the encounter itself is forcing her to lose all her illusions about her perceived racial status, which in some ways it is. She puts on a thorny façade with her suitor, blasting him with taciturn rudeness, but he is so balanced and persistent that she eventually collapses from the strain of the act. She ends up in his arms, which feels like less of an acknowledgment than a defeat.

These characters find no resolution, which allows Cassavetes to end the film as he began it, a direct challenge to what was seen as the rules. There’s also an emphasis on movement. Hugh, who may be slipping quickly into failure, decides to press on; at least he’s having a good time. Ben and his friends end up in a tin shack with the shit kicked out of them. This doesn’t stop him from getting up, dusting himself off and posing one more time like a matinee idol.
Before disappearing back into the milieu, another face in a crowd from which he can never fully extricate himself.
Miscellaneous:
It may not be intentional, but Rupert, Hugh’s manager (in the middle), has the whitest voice I have ever heard. Whiter than anyone I have ever met. The kind of ridiculous nasal voice that Dave Chappelle imitates. It’s pure ‘50s, like the faux-British, Connecticut prep school articulation (think Katherine Hepburn) of the immaculately refined, which also seems to have dropped off the face of the earth.

If the Nicholas Ray influence wasn’t apparent enough, his son is in the movie, as Tony.

Who knows how exact the casting was on this, but Ben’s posse plays like a small collection of gangster movie castoffs. On the left, the tough-talking little wise guy with a Napoleon complex, on the right, the steely-jawed, free fisted mug.

Jean-Luc Godard - Week-end (1967)

There’s a kind of ill-tempered cliché that tends to be associated with both the French and foreign film in general, a sneering intellectual with a terrible attitude, a taste for the avant-garde and a chip on his shoulder. Godard seems to willfully embody this stereotype – he’s loud, pretentious and certainly sneering - and makes movies that strive to be difficult and generically insulting. If he didn’t have such a sense of humor about it, films like this one would be almost unbearably painful. But Weekend, except for a short dip around the beginning of the third act, is consistently funny, which I guess gives it the right to be smug once in a while. Yes, it may be that the humor here is another one of those slimy devices that makes us laugh at something repulsive and then judges us for our callousness towards it, but I like to think that even as Godard plunged into a fantasy world of Maoist utopianism he could appreciate the need to temper his criticism with some laughs. The title of course is in English, jibing with the director's thematic branding of America as the fountainhead of hollow style and oppressive hyper-capitalism. This is a film where broad targets are splattered with lots and lots of paint.
Our heroes are Roland and Corinne, a married couple, citizens in a world seething with random, formless violence. They depart on a weekend journey to her father’s house, which owing to the chaos of this society never really gets on track and ends up devolving into ever more spectacular cases of absurd brutality. It’s a world where things like this tend to happen on a regular basis:

This first spat, which the couple watches with casual disinterest from their balcony, gives us a detached viewpoint that quickly disappears as Godard attempts to implicate us in this world, which is unsurprisingly our own with the knobs turned all the way up. Of course, Roland and Corinne fit right in, following in the pattern of Les Carabiniers, his early study in mass beastliness, as leads who are wholly and indefensibly despicable. Their visit to her father involves finding a way to kill him to get her inheritance faster. They share the same mindset as everyone else here; there is rarely a moment where people aren’t screaming at each other, struggling over property or fighting with whatever weapons they can get their hands on.

In Masculin/Feminin Godard made his point about the daily ignorance of ongoing atrocities by inserting instances of random violence (a woman shooting her husband outside a café, gunfire on a crowded train) that were willfully ignored by everyone but those involved. Here, there’s a landscape of concentrated violent chaos that would seem impossible to ignore, including:

Car wrecks

Dead hipsters

Sheep!

Yet they do ignore it, which says a lot about how angry (or at least, how filled with spleen) Godard is at this point in his career. The characters’ behavior takes the satire of the film far beyond overt digs at society into a grand absurdist free-for-all of broad, punishing brutality. The first clear incident is the famous tracking shot, where the camera follows their car as it slowly weaves, for ten uninterrupted minutes, through a traffic jam. The jam functions as a semi-whimsical cross-section of life; in the morass there are zoo animals, boats, people playing chess in the road, teenagers making out, and then this:

Tada! It’s the kind of low blow that the film loves to go for, where it gets us immersed in some absorbing scene and then slaps us with a stunning, violent rejoinder. The idea is simple and obviously valid: how can one enjoy a life of mindless consumerism when there are so many horrible things going on around them?

This is how Godard traps us into feeling bad about ourselves, a technique that’s sure to earn as much annoyance and disdain as it is real feelings of understanding. Again, without the absurdity and humor this would be a disaster (as what I’ve seen of the director’s more soberly pissed off ‘70s material tends to be); it’s fascinating how a film this great comes so close to being crushingly terrible.

The way I see it, the moment where he really tries to trap us is the last section of the second act, where Corinne and Roland have lost their car in the above explosion (Corinne’s reaction is to scream “My Hermes handbag!”) and have hitched a ride with two immigrant workers - a Congolese fellow and a rather unconvincing looking Arab (a Godard regular, Hungarian actor Laszlo Szabo). There have been scenes of class conflict throughout, most prominently an extended argument between a rich woman and the tractor driver who ran over her boyfriend, but here Godard drops us into a grueling marathon of political rhetoric.

It’s presented very simply, two shots that dominate about fifteen minutes of screen time; as the guy from the Congo speaks we see a close shot of the Arab eating, then the Arab speaks and we see the other eating. Like so:

Aside from however the eating ties into the theme of constant consumption, these shots are so stifling because they offer no recourse from the lecture we’re forced to hear. A lot of critics describe this as Godard indulging himself in a little personal speechifying, but I think it’s more than that. He is purposely trying to make us miserable (the way he seems to see it, he has the right to abuse his audience a little), to put us in the exact same shoes as the characters. When faced (literally) with the plights of these two workers, we cannot spare fifteen minutes to listen and instead fidget uncomfortably in our seats. This quote from the 1967 New York Times review seems apt:

“There is a moment near the end when the movie cracks up - long, dogmatic, motionless diatribes on behalf of Africa and the Arab countries with a peroration against black nonviolence, which keeps one thinking Biafra, Biafra, and wanting to walk out. (In fact, it might be advisable to walk out when the speeches begin for a cup of coffee and a cigarette.)”

However joking this reaction may be, it seems like exactly what Godard was begging for, the idea that leaving the theater to consume is preferable to sitting through such speeches. The speeches, then, act as a Brechtian wedge that dispels any notion of this film as winding down as passively enjoyable entertainment. Everything that occurs afterwards is equally hard to stomach.

My first reaction was not only “oh my god what is that thing,” but “why am I being forced to look at it.” Apparently it was intended as food (a rabbit?), and the above still is from after it has been covered with the tidal splashing of the blood of Corinne’s mother’s, who they end up killing after they receive a smaller portion of the inheritance than expected. The same kind of thing occurs later when we’re forced to watch the slaughter of a pig (I never thought I was squeamish, but this almost made me gag) and some skin-crawling cannibalism (more on that later). These are the film’s most immature moments, where Godard is forcing us to admit culpability by basically waving the corpses of dead Vietnamese villagers in our faces.

I find it interesting, however that those two monologues are so purposely boring, when a matching one, occurring near the beginning of the film, is played the opposite way.

Here, Corinne, in her bra and panties, informs her husband of an attempted affair turned into a bizarre and degrading ménage a trois involving the intended lover’s wife. Roland listens impassively (human connection, even jealousy, seem beyond these people), intruding at the end only to ask “was it a nightmare?” Corinne isn’t sure, and without the time or energy to focus on the film’s toying with the fragile, subjective nature of reality, I’ll just focus on how this monologue relates to the other.

The scene is played for laughs, or at least mockery, with a banal, tensely dramatic score that becomes so loud it almost drowns out the character’s voices. At the same time, it’s the kind of thing that grabs your attention, not just because it’s about sex but because it’s tightly and appealingly written, unlike the shambling, unfocused speeches the workers make.

So what is happening here? Is Godard pulling another one of his tricks, pouring all his energy into keeping us hanging on every word in the sex monologue so our annoyance with the political one will seem all the more appalling? I think what’s actually occurring is a concession. Maybe he is capable of admitting that yes, sex and consumption are endlessly appealing, but such pleasure is trivial in the face of such horrors as we are shown.

The sex monologue ties in later to the cannibalism that’s presented. The cannibals are a band of anarchists that capture our heroes, and their eating of humans literalizes the degradation that Corinne described earlier, which involved her performing cunnilingus in a bowl of milk (this film really cannot get past eating) and having eggs cracked over her naked body.

This is the English tourist who they’re preparing to eat, inserting a fish and eggs exactly where it looks like.

A lot is also made by viewers of the apparent fact that these rebels, who act so brutally, are the stand-ins for Godard’s real feelings in the movie. Honestly, this seems ridiculous. They’re portrayed just as badly as the arch-capitalists who dominate the earlier sections of the film , and their ridiculous behavior even connects - the way they play a drum set in the middle of the forest and communicate on short-wave radio with names taken from American movies. It seems like rather than supporting their anarchy Godard is condemning the idea of violence used to combat violence. All of these things – sex, violence, products and food - are united in the wild swirl of selfish consumption. “You can fuck her before you eat her,” one anarchist says to the other. The last shot is of one half of the couple eating the other, inured by the constant violence into becoming a member of the group. This seems like not only another damning refusal of the validity of their actions, but a bold statement on the end result of mindless consumption.

Jean-Pierre Leaud, of The 400 Blows and Masculin-Feminin, gets two of the best roles in this movie. Here he strides around dramatically as St. Juste, a Napoleonesque blowhard. Below, he has a part in the funniest scene in the movie, singing hurriedly into a payphone as Corinne and Roland attempt to steal his car.

Like Les Carabiniers Godard highlights these character’s internal ugliness by making them look generally sour and unattractive. Take a look at the mug on this one.

At one point, our heroes not only meet and argue with Emily Bronte, they set her on fire. This is one of those cases where his complete disregard for rules and order pays fantastic dividends. Not only this, he anticipated a thousand future blockbusters by filling his film with constant shots of exploding cars.

Finally, no overtly political Godard movie would be complete without the intrusion of strangely placed, confusing title cards. Some good examples:

"A Week of Four Thursdays"

A nifty little speedometer that pops up whenever their car is going fast.

“A film found in a dumpster” (yes, this one)

The Lounge Lizards - The Lounge Lizards (1981)

Listening to The Lounge Lizards I can’t help but think of those film noir parodies you’d see on kids TV shows, where you’d have the main character as the fedora-wearing private eye and the leggy dame and the unlit office filled with alluring shadows. In other words, all the touchstones except the fifth of rye. I cannot even begin to think of the names of any of the shows that played with this kind of joke (the image is so indelible in my mind that I really hope I didn’t make it up) but I’m sure they all had the same kind of music - a smoky, sleazy jazz leaking in through the slant-blinds. This is that type of jazz.

What these lizards are doing here is pulling an elaborate joke. At least, from what I’ve read, this was their initial intention. After this album they settled down and became just an ordinary jazz band. The joke, as imperceptible as it may be, is mostly in the sound, the way genre constructs are flashed and then quickly translated into a blaring spoof. There are the basic ingredients of jazz – the sax, trumpets, upright bass, drums and piano – but they’re bastardized into an outlandish cartoon. Once you understand this you can begin to appreciate the way the joke extends to the cover art, and also just how subtle a send-up this is, the laughable earnestness of skinny white guys in starched shirts looking pensive in their dressing room.

It’s tempting to opt for a Roy Lichtenstein comparison and say the entire joke is in the way the product relates to actual traditional jazz. It seems, from the cover at least, like this should be a jazz album, and so in presenting the style as is but in a different context you’re forcing the original style to make fun of itself. But Lichtenstein pieces were veritable copies, and really, there is no jazz that sounds anything like this, at least none that takes itself seriously (if there is, it really shouldn’t). What we have instead is a wet bag of clichés swollen up and jostling against one another.

This is the same referential stance that other acts (Tenacious D for one) take in mocking their genre of choice, by attaching themselves to the most extreme, absurdly bombastic aspects and winking a lot to make it clear they’re not being genuine. The Lounge Lizards are different; they go even further into the reaches of absurdity but they’re not so much joking (forget how I’ve described it so far) as they are screwing with genre limits. This isn’t an album that you laugh at.

Of course, it’s also not all that easy to mock jazz in the first place. You can dislike it (the best criticism I’ve heard is a comparison to masturbation – interesting only to those involved and a select group of fetishists) but for the most part the genre lack the dumb strut that makes rock and rap so easily lampoonable. So to play around with jazz the Lizards inflate its elements to a ridiculous proportion, at which size anything would look silly. It fails as criticism then (who knows if this was what they were even going for), but this failure is inconsequential because the album still succeeds musically. This is a great record. It’s like jazz, but it does things that it doesn’t, making it satisfying as a bizarre interpretation of the genre.

Generally, these songs sound like they’re about to explode. They strain at their limits, shaking them around like a dog with a rag doll, but as loose as the mask of genre slips it never really falls off. This sound has a lot to do with the guitar, which is offering commentary on the music behind it and at the same time effecting it. The best example is the opening track, “Incident on South Street,” which, besides the exaggerated back-alley horns and the campy sleaze of the piano actually starts off pretty normally. Things sound smooth; the cymbals do that little rain drop patter and the bass thumps along. Then the guitar kicks in, and, far from acting cordially, it tears a big hole in the song, screeching and grinding, sending the saxophones and drums into an epileptic fit in the process.

This kind of squelching nightmare has roots in free jazz and recalls well-costumed punk but relates most to no-wave, the movement that the Lizards are most closely identified with. They certainly apply its aesthetic, atonal and repetitive, but blast it through the jazz filter, blowing out the genre into garish, gaudy expositions. Again, the Lichtenstein comparison seems just out of my reach.

It’s hard to identify the point where self-aware mockery turns into a satisfying example of what’s being mocked, but that’s exactly what The Lounge Lizards are providing. In some ways, what they do here doesn’t seem to bizarre. Compare it to Sun Ra, as reinterpretation on a grand and bizarre scale. One abducts jazz and flies off with it into space; the other takes it into a back alley and beats the shit out of it.

Begushkin - Nightly Things (2007)

Nightly Things sounds like a lot of things - a backwoods black mass, a confusing joke, a Carpathian fever dream - but never actually settles into becoming any of them. It's too anxious, or too focused on staying unfocused, to be anything definable. This kind of furtive indifference, where influences and genre reference points are sampled and tossed aside just as quickly, has the potential for creating a disaster, but here it congeals nicely. This is an album that makes no sense and is all the better for it.

When I say "makes no sense," I really mean "doesn't conform to any kind of recognizable pattern." This results in something like the title track, which matches ghostly ambiance and eerily quavering guitar with lyrics that resemble a filthy slow-jam written by Rimbaud.

I could try to peg this as an I See A Darkness with strange gypsy-folk tendencies, but even with that unwieldy description I'd be ignoring the mock-poetic vocal style, the fascinating pairing of haunting and absurd, the way it tricks you into taking it seriously and then pokes you in the eye. The title track exemplifies the entire mood of the album. It sounds grave and spooky, an atmosphere that pulls you in until you realize you're listening to fancifully veiled descriptions of the devil's penis and increasingly painful sea-shanty metaphors for doin' it (the winner: "in your booty, I’ll be looting.")

Other songs are slightly more predictable. "At Night with Me" employs some of the most ridiculous lyrics but uses them seriously. Accordingly, the music is hushed and reverent, gushing strings and chilly mandolin. With this pairing an opposite mood to the title track occurs, and lines like "You can be my monkey girl / I will be the dude" are actually invested with some real feeling. "In the Yard" aims for increasingly preposterous apocalyptic imagery, but this build is matched with gypsy violin and theremin. An off-kilter tension remains in these songs' refusal to conform to expectation.

This is night music. It's an exploration of a landscape that seems like it could exist but becomes increasingly impossible to believe in. At times it's like Kentucky standing in for Romania, or vice-versa, with gypsy strings and picked guitars converging at some common and indistinguishable point. It embraces genre like a kid at a petting zoo - the needly stomp of the Black Heart Procession here, the wistful elegance of Django Reinhardt there, but inevitably rejects both place and influence. Stylistically, it refuses to behave. And that, as unsettling as it may be, is a good thing.

Louis Malle - Elevator to the Gallows (1959)

Good thrillers are like puzzles, and in that respect, Malle's Elevator to the Gallows is a perplexing steel trap. It starts simply enough. Julien Tavernier is a soldier turned businessman, working for a government-backed arms dealer whose wife he happens to be sleeping with. To clean up this situation he kills the boss, perfectly, sets it up as a suicide, and then promptly gets stuck in an elevator, only feet away from both escape and the murder scene.

This sets the narrative spiraling in three directions, two of them constantly poised at an intersection of noir and new wave, the third about a guy trying really hard to get out of an elevator. The first is the journey of Tavernier's mistress, Florence, who misses him at their meeting point, assumes he's run off without her, and begins fruitlessly combing a rain-soaked, neon-lit Paris for any sign of him. The second is that of young couple Veronique and Louis, who, presaging Godard's classically doomed teenage pairs, pull innocently at a thread of small crime that inevitably leads to murder.

Veronique has a crush on the dapper, wealthy Julien, and when Louis steals his idling car, wallet and gun (and by default his identity) she is dropped into a welcome fantasy as his mistress. The two head off on what becomes an unintentional crime spree, creating a fascinating parallel: as the trapped Julien and the distraught Florence search for a way to reconnect, the young couple, now defined as their shadow selves, commit a crime that both mirrors - and eventually exceeds - theirs.

It may seem like standard genre fare, but there is some message here, about violence always begeting violence, and more specifically, the way in which war profiteering creates an unstable global atmosphere of death for monetary gain. There are no good guys in this story; everyone is implicated in some way. Julien has fought in Algeria and Indochina and has clearly killed before, and not for the right reasons. His boss sells weapons. Louis is a small-time crook and the wealthy German (who figures into the story later on) has not been back to France since 'the occupation' (as he lightly refers to it).

His flippancy should be offensive, but this is a world far removed from that of World War II, one where war is a business like any other. Only the police seem above this, but the way the lead inspector transforms into a strutting orator at the appearance of reports suggests otherwise. This is a film that's deeply concerned about the cost of a world where certain people thrive off the murder of others.

Apart from this, the elevator is one of the best thriller conceits I have ever seen, especially because it seems like such a limiting device. How long can Malle keep us interested in a man trapped in a tiny steel box? Quite a while, it turns out, especially when, having escaped, Julien finds himself wishing he was still in the elevator.

The icing on the cake is the soundtrack, done entirely by Miles Davis, which is smooth and burnished in the vein of the best work from his Kind of Blue/Birth of Cool period. It seems overreaching to say it ties the entire film together, but this may be the best way to put it, especially in the way his tunes blare out of the teenage couples' car stereo and lurk behind Florence as she gropes desperately along the wet streets. In the end, everyone gets what they deserve, and we can see how clearly Malle has presented a world where every action has its own indirect consequence.

VA - I'm Not There (2007)

As a tribute, I'm Not There should be mediocre. At least, it should be expected to be, considering that passability is par for the course on these kind of mass reclamation projects, where the past is dredged up and passed around to a lot of willing (and often dirty) hands. As long as it's not atrocious (and maybe even if it is) the tribute will succeed in reminding us why we liked the original so much in the first place. I'm not sure exactly who to thank, but this one does better than that. It doesn't just exist on its own, it's impressive, even daunting, not because of the work of one artist but because of its levelheadedness, its size and its range.

There are 29 artists or groups represented, with a sort of revolving cast of musicians (Tom Verlaine, John Medeski, Lee Ranaldo, Calexico and others) doing a lot of extra work here and there. This house band (called The Million Dollar Bashers) stands as a supergroup of skilled musicans who aren't terribly exciting names. The rest of the selection follows the same mold - the best thing to call the choices is sober - which sounds boring but actually gives this whole thing the strength to sustain itself for so long (34 tracks, more than 2.5 hours) and with so many hands in the pot. There are no huge surprises but also no disasters.

Most importantly, there's also no deluge of in vogue radio favorites or buzz bands or even classic contemporaries. There are nods in each direction, and while these are some of the biggest missteps (Jack Johnson, Los Lobos, Sufjan Stevens) they're generally inoffensive (although Stevens comes really close).

As is the case with covers in general, the worst songs are the ones that stray to close to a format, whether it's that of the original song or the artist's own sound. Typically then, the crappiest stuff here is not only the retreads (Cat Power doing a half-hearted, husky impression of Blonde on Blonde Bob) but the covers that depart stylistically from both Dylan and the rest of the album (Sufjan giving "Ring Them Bells" the sixth-grade band recital treatment, The Hold Steady spilling beer and cigarette ash all over "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?," Karen-O screeching through "Highway 61 Revisited" with witless megaphone cadence).

Maybe I'm being a little harsh, but these uninspired flights of fancy look ridiculous next to great interpretations from some notable stalwarts, namely Stephen Malkmus, Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo, whose six combined songs justify this album by themselves. Sonic Youth does nearly the same thing that the younger indies fail at - applying their own sound on top of Dylan's - but it's done through the subtlest intrusion, a layer of almost wispy distortion on the title track.

The old-timers here also do well for themselves, and again, the album is smart to not force any overbearing personalities upon us. There's Roger McGuinn, who reinivented "Mr. Tambourine Man" with The Byrds and contributes a spot-on cover of "One More Cup of Coffee." Calexico nails the backing on this one, casting it as a revolving wheel of violin, organ, mariachi trumpet and Spanish guitar that's indicative of the stellar work they do in their five appearances here. Richie Havens, Willie Nelson and Ramblin' Jack Elliott are great at transposing the gruff harshness of modern Dylan onto his younger songs. Standouts also include Mark Lanegan ( a vast, spectral version of "Man in the Long Black Coat"), Charlotte Gainsbourg (gossamer and just fragile enough on "Just Like a Woman") and Eddie Vedder, whose cover of "All Along the Watchtower," while more a success for his backing artists (the usuals) is a twisted rendition that lands somewhere between the original and the Hendrix version.

I'm guessing the theme here is meant to be the same as the movie (he's everyone, he's no one, he's a rambling vampire drawing from all kinds of musical veins) and if so, the producers have done a great job at representing one man with many voices without resorting to the gimmickry of a Fall Out Boy appearance or the security of a classic-rock roundup. Best of all, this isn't a greatest hits album, it's a journey, the selections are often obscure and the format is intimidating, both for its size and the unfamiliarity of many of these songs. Like Dylan himself, I'm Not There is undefinable, challenging, and ultimately very satisfying.