Short takes: The Fall (2019)

A perfect sentence

Jonathan Glazer has directed two of my favorite films; “Sexy Beast” and “Under the Skin”, two films that couldn’t be more different. One is a relatively straightforward narrative about a retired thief (Ray Winstone) being reluctantly (very) recalled to active service by a near-demonic Ben Kingsley with some of the finest dialog ever put on screen. The other is a taciturn science fiction fable of an alien who assumes the form of Scarlett Johannsson, observing, stalking, and eventually, draining her male prey of their essences (or at least, their musculo-skeletal systems).

His latest is a short film that has as its inspiration, a visit to Trump Era America. The most Glazer is saying about his most recent work you can find here at the Guardian. I will be making enough references to the article, but it’s worth a read nonetheless.

It is a short few minutes of harrowing terror. That it encapsulates the past few years of a presidential term characterized by increasing division, pandering to a psychology of inciting mobs to attack the press and those who are not them, and a singularly monomaniacal approach to governance, it doesn’t take much to see in the images a parable of usurpation and mob rule. But it’s never “just that.”

Glazer in the Guardian article pulls on other sources to inform his response to what he’s experienced and it’s this that bears closer examination. If he calls on Goya and Brecht, he’s also summoning demons of deeper unease. The underlying origins of the moment have been with us since prehistory and woe be to us if we continue to understand how deep our divisions’ roots are.

I don’t believe there is a necessarily linear trajectory between the images of Goya’s that Glazer has cited as influence, aside from Yo lo vi (I saw this). The etching of El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (The sleep of reason produces monsters) is the closest we come to a visual analogue. If anything, Yo lo vi is more a statement of thematic resonance and Esto es peor (this is worse), while not finding a matching visual reference in the film, is certainly present in depicting the horrifying results of the madness of a movement that mutilates literally and philosophically.

Glazer’s right that Nazism took over like a fever, and similarly, the Trump Era is the fruition of a nightmare that has been bubbling just beneath the surface of the polity. Will it boil over into a quashing of the rule of law? Will the oligarchs and their base consume the civil rights and freedoms that used to define the United States? In one sense, this is the open-ended question that “The Fall” ends with.  However, as with all art, there’s the larger existential question to reckon with and the movie is almost a visual manifesto of Camusian philosophy. It is absurd, but our hero begins the Sisyphian ascent from the depths. The open-ended question here is what happen next?

There’s something telling about invoking Camus and his Myth of Sisyphus; the characters in the film are masked, reminiscent of Greek faces in sculpture and theatre. What we encounter is a scene that wouldn’t be out of place in Aeschylus or Euripides. The call-backs to myth are as much Orphic as Sysyphic.

The fall in The Fall itself is worth looking at. Scored by Mica Levi there’s a ritualistic, percussive drive that provides a kind of archetypal continuity to the proceedings.

The film begins with a bucolic nightmare for the victim we soon see attempting flight by climbing high up a tree until shaken down to the mob who seize him and then take a phot with their trophy.

The echo here is mostly directly related to the imageof Trump’s sons with a leopard they shot but it’s more extensive than that; by extension, the mob that follows such leaders would like to assume what they see as their leaders’ mantles of greatness and power. The horrible joke here is that these leaders are cowards and fools, at best. At worst, they are venal criminals with hardened hearts and move from a base of hatred and fear of the Other.

  

A noose is placed over the sacrifice’s neck and the next fall is from the crossbar of a gallows. It is a descent into an abyss (the Abyss?) and we see the rope disappear into the darkness. The camera shifts point of view and we see members of the mob gazing into the hole. I want to write that they gaze uncomprehendingly, but because of the masks, one wonders. Each mask is a unique visage frozen in an particular expression. Body language betrays little, but I sense we can infer that comprehension is limited since the mob disperses and we see our human sacrifice begin the long return to the surface.

While Glazer utilizes long takes for the fall into the abyss, he employs a series of quick cuts to show the mob’s flurry of activity from holding down our hero/sacrifice to dancing away from the gallows once they’ve ascertained his fall has succeeded.

The tree sequence is a mid-shot of our man holding onto the tree itself as the crowd shakes and shakes it and successfully dislodges him from his perch. This isn’t a long sequence, but the suspense and terror is accentuated by the uncertainty of what is to follow. We don’t know if the crowd is going to set upon him and torture or devour him, but it becomes clear that even though neither happens, something deeper and perhaps as bad, if not worse, is afoot.

We may take some comfort in the lack of onscreen torture, but it’s the absence of knowing that evokes a greater fear outside the frame. The full situation is greater than can be contained in the few minutes we have before us. We begin to frame a context for the situation and there is simply no way that it could be beneficent. The act is all there is.

There is no morality here, no rule of law. There is only a primitive acting out of persecution. Visible torture isn’t necessary to emphasize the inhumanity of what we’re witnessing.

Glazer’s square compositions from the gallows and the rope falling to the view looking up from the fall are an exercise in contraction not just of view and forced perspective but act as a single stream of finitude, of finality and (again) by extension, death.

Glazer quoted Anthony Minghella as saying that a short film should be like a perfect sentence. “The Fall” would satisfy that criterion but as with all such consummate works, it contains multitudes.