Results tagged “Close-ups”

Writer/director Michael Haneke’s 1997 film Funny Games feels like a response to something that hadn’t happened yet. Sure, we’d had Natural Born Killers and other ultra-violent movies, but the fetishism of agony hadn’t yet become a crass trend.

The prospect of Haneke’s English-language remake — due in theaters in late winter and starring Naomi Watts and Tim Roth — is worrisome. (George Sluizer’s American botch of his own The Vanishing comes to mind.) But it’s also necessary; as unpleasant as it is, Funny Games deserves to be seen more widely because it forces introspection. I doubt you can watch it without seriously considering why you watch movies of this sort, and how you react to them.

And it’s more timely now than it was upon its initial release a decade ago.

For me, the film is most striking in the scene in which Anna (Susanne Lothar) is forced by white-clad, white-gloved psychopathic visitors Peter and Paul to remove her clothes, while her helpless husband (The Lives of Others’ Ulrich Mühe) casts his eyes down and her young son sits on a couch with a bag over his head.

There are dozens of close-ups of hands in Peter Weir’s Fearless, and mostly the extremities belong to Max Klein, the distant plane-crash survivor played by Jeff Bridges. What follows is not a comprehensive catalog but covers the majority of these shots. They are presented in the order in which they appear in the movie.

I’ve been curious about the hand shots for years, but even after collecting these screen captures I don’t have a firm grasp on their meaning. So I’m throwing them out there and welcoming comments, hypotheses, and arguments.

The movie begins in Auggie Wren’s cigar shop with omniscient chatter about the Mets and ends in a deli with a made-up tale about how Auggie got his first camera. Almost everything in between is also bullshit, in the sense that its relationship with objective reality is utilitarian. We speak the truth when it suits our needs, but we shouldn’t let it get in the way of the story we’re trying to spin.

Smoke, the 1995 collaboration between director Wayne Wang and author Paul Auster, isn’t judgmental about lies and half-truths. It pays respect to and finds value in narratives of all sorts, from an anecdote about Queen Elizabeth and Sir Walter Raleigh and the weight of smoke to the construction of identity through fibs.

But that doesn’t really become clear until the deli scene, in which Auggie tells about how he had Christmas dinner with the blind grandma of a kid who shoplifted from his store and ended up taking a brand-new camera from her apartment. Auggie’s audience, a novelist named Paul Benjamin, gently summarizes the movie:

“Bullshit is a real talent, Auggie. To make up a good story, a person has to know how to push all the right buttons. I’d say you’re up there among the masters.”“What do you mean?”“It’s a good story.”

It is a good story. And Smoke won’t let you forget it.