The Forgotten Space
Directed by Allan Sekula and Noel Burch

As The Forgotten Space points out, the sea has always been mysterious and largely unknown to humanity, despite the fact that it takes up the majority of the Earth’s surface. However, 90 per cent of commercial transport occurs in this “forgotten space,” meaning that actual obfuscation may accompany the mystery of the sea. The film’s project is to undo some of this forgetting; it develops from a comment on maritime commerce into a sweeping examination of systems and stories that global capitalism blinds its consumers from witnessing.

The political documentary is an essential form in this kind of pursuit—bringing the forgotten and obscured into detailed view in order to up transparency and, sometimes, provoke action. The form has potent potential to respond to faceless, marginalizing forces by chronicling actual human experiences with depth and rawness. In doing so, documentaries must triumph the specific over the general.

This is the ultimate pitfall of The Forgotten Space: it chooses to look out at the capitalist system rather than turning inward to human experience. In its voyage with the global shipping system, it depicts a number of local situations—in Rotterdam, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and Bilbao—with insight and often heart-rending interviews and clips. However, the potency of these accounts is diminished by the film’s over-ambitiousness. It often strays from the broad subject of shipping to the even broader and more ambiguous subject of capitalism itself. Indeed, it addresses many of the crises of late capitalism—such as excessive globalization, the dominance of multinational corporations, the gambling of market investors, and over-mechanization—independently of shipping. More problematically, the local stories begin to appear secondary to broader ideological concerns.

The personal accounts, which are too numerous and treated too quickly, become lost. The Forgotten Space seems an attempt to depict global capitalism in its totality, almost forgetting one of the reasons the system is troubling to begin with—it is too widespread and pervasive to ever be accounted for.

Stylistically, the film is certainly well-executed, if at times a bit polished and self-conscious. Allen Secula’s narration effectively captures the bleakness of his subject matter in a droning but always insightful tone. At times, his words resonate poetically: “in the outskirts of Rotterdam’s shipping yards, the little human labor that remains has become a literal appendage to the machine.” Elsewhere, they comes across as smug and cynical, such as when he describes “the free play of the mind and the muscles” at a Rotterdam day care as “spirited rehearsal for the automatic future.”

The film bears a strange resemblance to Lars von Trier’s Melancholia in that it communicates a sense of impending doom with beautiful images. The Forgotten Space contains refined shot after refined shot, giving grace to vessels, shipping yards, meandering trains and interview subjects alike. However, one must question the politics of such aesthetics. Is watching, and perhaps learning, enough? There is a faint call for action at the end, but the film is less a political catalyst than an aesthetically refined portrayal of something widely known to be vast and faceless.

Opens February 15 at Anthology Film Archives

Watching TV with the Red Chinese
Directed by Shimon Dotan

Like a late-night armchair philosophy session, Watching TV With the Red Chinese has lofty cerebral ambitions. It grasps—or more accurately, claws—to make sense to itself. The year is 1980 and the setting is an especially rough patch of Harlem. Students Tzu (James Chen), Wa (Keong Sim) and Chen (Leonardo Nam) have just arrived from communist China. They encounter turmoil left and right—homelessness, violence, urban grit—but they quickly make friends with their next-door neighbor Dexter (Ryan O’Nan), a literature teacher, and his friend Billy (Michael Esper), a struggling filmmaker.

From here, the film does a lot of thinking, which comes mainly in the form of isolated philosophical pronouncements from its characters. A shot of a malaise-filled Dexter waiting in a grimy subway station appears on numerous occasions, each accompanied by a different angst-ridden morsel of thought. These usually have something to do with chance and alternate reality, which seems to fill each character’s thoughts. These reflections quickly grow tiresome and repetitive, eventually bearing little more distinction or permanence than a passing subway car.

In scene after scene the Chinese trio serves as little more than backdrop to the lives of the film’s American characters. Billy makes the students the subject of his film, Watching TV with the Red Chinese of the same title. Grainy footage from this project is interspersed through the actual film. In these frames, the Chinese are represented as clumsy and dogmatic in their response to American culture. This film has elements to provide meaningful insight about cross-cultural exchange, but the characters have so little depth that cultures pass each other like ships in the night. There are a few moments of poignant cultural dialogue, like an impromptu game of football in the street, but these are few and fleeting.

Towards the end, the narrative devolves into a love triangle between Dexter, his ex-girlfriend Suzanne (Gillian Jacobs) and Chen. Each character becomes emotionally wrought to the point of melodrama, while the film fails to present a single scene of viable dialogue or romance between lovers. Especially problematic is the fact the Chen, who Suzanne does eventually date, never seems to be more than an aside to Dexter and Suzanne’s emotional troubles. Caught in the midst of this, Chen dies in a grisly accident; he is the literal victim of the film’s refusal to account for cultural or emotional nuance.

Watching TV With the Red Chinese suffers the same miserable fate that awaits much grandiose philosophical thinking: verbiage becomes an inadequate substitute for life. This obsession with idea of content suffocates the film from beginning to end.

Opens January 20

Young Goethe in Love
Directed by Philipp Stölzl

Young Goethe in Love opens with all of the trappings of youth in rebellion. The young, strapping Johann Goethe (Alexander Fehling) dashes haphazardly through the manicured courtyard of a law school. He’s running late for a law exam, in which, of course, he humiliatingly fails. His exit is met with jeers from more successful peers, and in a gracefully filmed sequence he scrapes the German equivalent of “Kiss My Ass” into of the snow. Scenes like these, in which a young person makes a boisterous outcry against their forced and structured circumstances, are familiar. But the familiarity of the scene in no way leads into a predictable film; rather, it is just the first layer of many. While the film is mostly just about the emotional travails of being young and in love, it explores the realm with a high degree of wit, style and historical consciousness.

The conversations between Goethe and his love interest Lotte Buff (Miriam Stein)—moments that have ruined many a similar film with dripping, debased romanticism—are effectively witty during their courtship and earnest and insightful in their separation after Lotte’s betrothal to another man. While their chemistry has a certain Germanic rigidity, the viewer can tap into the range of Fehling and Stein’s emotional expression.

Indeed, Lotte’s arranged marriage, Goethe’s attempted suicide, a pistol duel between Goethe and Lotte’s husband, and even scenes of drunken stupor are enacted with emotional nuance that is sure to provoke sympathy. Goethe and Lotte become more than storied, star-crossed lovers, although Stein’s acting goes further than Fehling’s on that front. Fehling at times seems a bit dazed amidst the contours shaped by the greater breath and sharpness of other performances.

A rich aesthetic sensibility ripens the emotional content of the film. The cinematography is elegant and crisp, and given that the film was shot mostly in actual 18th century buildings rather than on sets, there is a creative use of natural light. The compositions are a bit too ordered at times, but the cinematographer Kolja Brandt loosens the reins at appropriate moments, such as a scene of earthy sexual passion and one of a topsy-turvy street carnival. Style is an occasional topic of conversation in the film, and this preoccupation is matched by elegant, individualized, and historically conscious costumes.

However, the film’s historicity is strained at times. In Lotte and Goethe’s last encounter, Lotte foretells the story of their happy life apart. Goethe is skeptical of any prospect of happiness and she responds that the story “is more than the truth. It is poetry.” While this high valuation of literary pursuits is admirable, it raises some issues with the film’s premise: the supposedly true story that spawned the literary classic The Sorrows of Young Werther. Her utterance unintentionally comes across as whimsical; a very personal moment is rendered impersonal by philosophical pronouncement wanting in originality. Further, it comes across as a catch-all response to any perceived anachronisms or inaccuracies—a apology the film doesn’t need to make. But on the whole, the film effectively balances intentional whimsy and emotional gravity and supplements them with a refined sense of style. It tells a compelling and enjoyable story.

Opens November 4

Trespass
Directed by Joel Schumacher

Everyone’s asking for pity in Trespass, Joel Schumacher’s latest “psychological thriller” that’s actually an anti-psychological thriller. A majority of the 90-minute film takes place on a single evening in which the Miller family is invaded in their lavish home by a band of swarthy extortionists. But that’s not all. Teenage Avery (Liana Liberato) is mad at her mom Sarah (Nicole Kidman) for not letting her go to a party, and Sarah is pouring herself glasses of wine over her money-obsessed husband Kyle’s (Nicholas Cage) neglect of their sex life. The “Mo Money Mo Problems” plot is set up in about 10 minutes, at which point Avery is already dodging security cameras, hopping fences, and getting into her tipsy friend’s car to go party.

The burglars, disguised as cops, get into the Miller compound in a few seconds time and moments later Sarah and Kyle are on the floor and lots of shouting ensues. Here’s where we get a first taste of the film’s perilously clichéd dialogue; Elias (Ben Mendelsohn), the head honcho of the burglars, yells, “I know a lot about you, Kyle, and what I don’t know, you’re gonna tell me.” One wonders if an actual burglar has ever made this pronouncement, and even if so, if anyone has ever felt legitimately threatened by it.

This is a central failure of the film’s narrative: the burglars are so dumb that it requires an extremely willful suspension of disbelief to buy that they even make it into the house, let alone manage to stay for so long. Spoiler alert: each of the four burglars dies. And of course the Millers all survive, albeit frazzled and bruised. But who could imagine that Elias’ younger brother Jonah (Cam Gigandet) would die in a pile of burning cash set aflame by a match and a coincidental trail of gasoline? The four deaths each occur in the blink of an eye and without any narrative groundwork, rendering them laughable. But that’s okay because they’re bad people, right? The Millers are at least trying to maintain a home for themselves—they’ve clearly invested a lot of money towards that end. Do the burglars have anything to show for themselves? Do they deserve any sympathy?

Well, the film gives the burglars some dimensionality, just not much. Elias is a dope dealer because he’s “not good at anything else;” he needs some cash to pay off a nemesis. Elias’ girlfriend, Petal (Jordana Spiro), is a drug-addict and a frenzied emotional wreck. The handsome and robust Jonah has his eye on Sarah, and she can’t help but glimpse back. There are a number of dream-sequence-like flashbacks to flirtatious encounters between the two during Jonah’s prior visits as a technician. The suspicion of adultery—none actually occurs—might appear to complicate the film’s simplistic moral landscape, but it falls short of even a soap opera’s depth of intrigue.

The film makes a lot of hints at current events. Kyle deals in the kinds of things that led America to economic peril—you know, like real estate (it’s unclear). He admits to living entirely on credit. When the burglars realize they’ve robbed nothing but a middleman, Avery, who took a cab home from the party after getting fed up with a douchey, coke-gummed boy, offers to go back to the party where she knows there’s a stash of money. She says it’s saved up for “the next 9/11,” whatever form that cataclysm might take. We see the Miller compound’s penetration by the terrifying outside world, which seems spiraling towards collapse on terms that go unarticulated. Imagine an incoherent series of news ticker announcements on one of the Millers’ big-screen TVs: REAL ESTATE BUBBLE… HEROIN TRADE… TERROR THREAT…

Amidst all of this confusion, the film seems to yearn for world that only exists in American mythology: a world in which the Millers could just be a happy nuclear family, living self-sufficiently on their homestead. But we never get a glimpse of what this might look like specifically for the Millers; they’re fundamentally unhappy, burglary or not. In the closing frame, they lie together in a pile of their own sweat and blood, and whatever hope we have for their future exists only as wish-fulfillment. Within these confines, actual empathy for any character is far-fetched.

Opens October 14