PIFF Dispatch. 9.

Occasionally you see a movie that is divided against itself. Manufactured Landscapes is such a film. It's a documentary by Jennifer Baichwal about Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, who specializes in images of industry. For Burtynsky, there is nothing more beautiful or intriguing than a gaping blackened pit dug out of the earth by a mining company or the husk of a rusted ship being dismantled by a team of Bengalese children like insects on a carcass, or a Manhattan-sized factory filled with uniformed worker drones churning out 200 light fixtures a day. As he states near the end, Burtynsky makes no attempt to politicize his images. He merely presents them for the viewer, or photo buff, or connoisseur to work out what they think of it. One gets the feeling that Burtynsky is hedging, that in fact he deeply, truly loves the subjects of his portraits and, though aware of the ramifications of what caused his subjects to come into degenerating existence, he is nevertheless struck by their odd inhuman beauty. Well, after all, you can see the affection in the crisp, colorful images that the film reproduces.

But that is not the film that Baichwal is making. Instead, she is using his pictures to protest globalization, the plight of workers in third world countries, the pointless and endless drudgery of repetitious manual labor, the cruelty of factory bosses, and the consequences of industry on the environment. Both these views are fine, but it makes for a schizophrenic film. Especially when Baichwal backgrounds the images with unnerving droning industrial music, credited to Dan Driscoll. In the end, there is a tad too much long-take Koyaanisqatsi-esque live action industrial horror footage and not enough exploration of Burtynsky's art, technique and philosophy. You come away from the film not even sure what he looks like. Peter Debruge (Variety) and Adam Nayman (Eye Weekly) also comment on the film. [And earlier, here: Brian Darr.]

Flannel Pajamas [site] is that quaint thing, the story of a relationship. It appears not to have any meaning beyond that. It just wants to tell the story of a romance. Though it starts out with savvy, witty New Yorkers and their guarded repartee, it is less Woody Allen than his mentor, Ingmar Bergman, as the film dismantles and dissects intimacy and bares its lovers literally and figuratively.

The lovers are Stuart Sawyer (Justin Kirk of Angels in America, who has the sharp angular features of a young Keith Carradine), and Nicole Reilly (the befreckled Julianne Nicholson, of various Laws and Orders). We meet them shortly after they have met each other, in a diner chaperoned by their shared doctor (Stephanie March, also of Law and Order). He's kind of barbed, and yet is praised for lying, which happens to be his job (something vague about publicizing Broadway shows). Yet somehow they connect, partially because not only is he a fibber, but he is also frank.

But soon enough the world of the relationship expands and we and she meet his nutty brother Jordan (Jamie Harrold), her terrible friends, her big family. He is Jewish and she is something else, Catholic perhaps, though neither that nor his job seem to have any bearing on the couple's day-to-day activities, at least not until the Alzheimer's-stricken mother turns out to harbor racial stereotypes, and Nicole appears to rejoin her faith. Yet soon they begin to have for each other that relationship-killing emotion, contempt (according to Seattle-based intimacy scholar John M Gottman). Starting out as the perfect guy, dispensing money freely, Stuart becomes one of those guys who dislikes her friends and relatives and just generally turns cynical. Nicole starts her own business, and that fails. And he strikes out on his own, too. A baby looms as a solution to the surface tensions of the marriage.

Flannel Pajamas is written and directed by Jeff Lipsky, the indie film producer famous from Peter Biskind's Down and Dirty Pictures, and presumably somewhat autobiographical, at least as observed life, with just the slightest moral and emotional favoritism towards the male half of the marriage. Though the film relies on sit-comy transition shots of buildings and has a static affect (except in a hospital cafeteria scene), overall Lipsky's film is good at portraying the tensions that arise unexpectedly from moment to moment in an intimate relationship. Additional views: Todd McCarthy (Variety) and Nick Schager (Slant).

Anna Bucchetti's Dreaming by Numbers [site]is a slice-of-life documentary about a peculiarity of Italian life; the filmmaker herself is from the Netherlands. It's a fascinating look at a core contradiction in the psychology of the population of Naples. Though presumably practicing Catholics, these men and women pile into the equivalent of off-track betting parlors to gamble, picking as their lottery numbers figures culled from a guidebook to dreams that draws upon peasant superstitions. The two women who work in one particular gambling office, or ricevitore, tell their story, as do many of their customers. Told, unusually, in black and white, with a quick and unexpected music track (but no narration), Dreaming by Numbers has the immediacy of Frederick Wiseman's documentaries. The sole other review of the film appears in, where else, Variety, from Deborah Young.

Posted by dwhudson at March 2, 2007 3:57 AM