Ray Pride

A graphic designer I know who works in New York was asked to create brand identity for a small company: logo, stationery, a number of other things.

He took out a notepad and pen and listened to their extended spiel, asked a few questions, then put pen to paper and in five minutes, covered several pages with precise drawings of everything they had asked for. It was exactly what they wanted, and he reminded them of his fee of several thousand dollars. One of the partners said, "but you did that in ten minutes!" My friend corrected him firmly, "Forty years and ten minutes, actually."

Over the past several weeks, any number of monumental tributes to longitude, latitude, endurance and duration have been on display, including the almost three-hour "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End"; the U.S. premier of the restored, 1968 Oscar-winning "War and Peace," an eight-hour canvas that would cost a billion dollars to make today; Jacques Rivette’s once-lost masterpiece, "Out 1" (1971), an immersive twelve hours and twenty-six minutes, as well as his tidier 1991 "La belle noiseuse" (pictured), which charts the starts and stops of painting a female nude, with Michel Piccoli studying the form of the usually nude Emmanuelle Béart. And of course, then there’s Sunday night’s final episode of "The Sopranos," and that series is nothing if not an eighty-four hour movie. And that would be an eighty-four hour movie that has one of the most remarkably irresolute resolutions in memory. (Which will be described, sort of, a few paragraphs down.)

In "Out 1," two factions of actors rehearse plays through very 1970s exercises, and there are other intrigues, and there are a dozen or more characters, and the streets of Paris, but the extreme length of that great film hides a beautiful revelation: how in their own lives, their actions outside the rehearsal space, the actors, acting as "actors," and seen rehearsing at almost unbearable length, eventually reveal how their work transforms their real-life behavior. This results in one of the most stunning scenes I know, a lengthy, unbroken, fixed position shot in which a theater director (Michel Lonsdale) tentatively attempts to encourage his two closest female friends and collaborators, his girlfriend and ex-girlfriend, into a tender ménage a trois. The impact of the scene wouldn’t exist without all that came before, the infuriating as well as the inspired. "One can get pleasure out of looking at or listening to absolutely anything," Rivette said in a contemporary interview. "Some films seem to be made with a view to narcissistic pleasure, totally without productivity. If one doesn’t bring along one’s euphoria, the films themselves are nothing."

I’m far from a "Sopranos" completist, but I am in awe of the idea of how the actions in the final episode would resound in the head of a devoted viewer, who brought their own "euphoria" along, who did an even more epic act of immersion over the past six years than the 150 or so viewers over their Memorial Day weekend watching "Out 1" at the Siskel Film Center.

I don't get the television critics who were wailing Monday morning, like Mary McNamara in the L.A. Times and Charlie McCollum of the San Jose Mercury News, that they had been deprived of their necessary closure, of graphic imagery, of terrible violence. At least Heather Havrilesky has her shit together, in the best read I've seen, over at Salon. "Just like the rest of us. Going to hell in a red leather booth, with Journey playing in the background." Not quite "And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past," but fine nonetheless.

What David Chase manages to do that brought all these thoughts together is a final gesture that is an act of subtraction rather than addition, a leap into nothingness. Tony Soprano and family assemble at a diner in a slow scene filled with familiarity. A song plays. The lyrics are telling, in the usual style of the show. "Some will win, some will lose/ Some were born to sing the blues/ Oh, the movie never ends/ It goes on and on and on and on…Don’t stop believin’/ Hold on to the feelin’." Strangers enter. Tony’s wary. His daughter’s having trouble parallel parking. Tony looks up, and…

You know someone’s been thinking long, hard and very clearly when they manage to come up with a simple cut that surpasses anything you could do with the image itself, and with the inspired final scene of "The Sopranos," is David Chase really the first person to use Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" to create a parallel to Samuel Beckett's novel, "The Unnamable"? ("Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.") Heady stuff. Eighty-four hours plus a split second. Less than a split second. Darkness. Oblivion.

"La belle noiseuse" plays Saturday and Wednesday at Siskel. Tony Soprano has been condemned to live.

(2007-06-12)

Also by Ray Pride

Tip of the Week
A diverse, eclectic program opens the latest edition of the long-running Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, and shows stunning range
(2007-06-05)

Triskaidekaphobia rules
While there’s no real narrative tension in the new installment of the "Ocean's" series, it’s delightful in almost every frame and each particular
(2007-06-05)

One Dish
Yellow Submarine, aka Odge's, a decades-old burger-and-hotdogs joint on the ground floor of an eccentric four-story brick building with a green-shingled mansard roof, and boldly colored, flat paintings of unattractive food on the outside walls. The crinkle-cut fries are very good, the oil doesn’t add flavor of other foods
(2007-06-01)

Only Disconnect
"Falling Man" is an imperfect book, necessary, but necessarily elusive. A couple chapters near the end seem to dawdle. This deceptively flat late passage has to be accommodated as he seems to lose his pace in slower movements, lesser themes, events damped in decrescendo. And with fearsome suddenness and rapacity, all heck breaks loose, returning to the opening chapters as a man who worked at the World Trade Center wanders from dust to light
(2007-05-29)

Tip of the Week
(2007-05-29)

Mommy, I Googled Murder
(2007-05-29)

Summer Guide 2007: June Movies
(2007-05-22)

Summer Guide 2007: July Movies
(2007-05-22)

Summer Guide 2007: August Movies
(2007-05-22)

At First Sight
(2007-05-22)

Tip of the Week
(2007-05-22)

One Dish
(2007-05-18)

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