Translated material
Anton Dolin. Cinema-19: Style and meaning
For the Moscow premiere of the film "The Cage"
It's a more amusing than alarming trend: Americans feel that they started repeating themselves in every film ten years ago, and are trying to compensate for the triviality of the story with stylistic experimentation. The exercise, by the way, is not useless, because style is a sign of taste, and bad taste has been and remains the main disadvantage of Hollywood cinema. And in this sense, the new film “The Cage” is very indicative.
In general, if you watch “The Cage” absolutely impartially, without succumbing for a minute to the peculiar charm of the film, then the total banality of all the collisions and plot twists catches your eye. Here is an evil maniac - he is insane; Guided by insane reasons, he catches young girls and kills them in a particularly cruel way, after which he rapes the bodies. Here is an honest and intelligent FBI man who decided to catch the villain at any cost. I caught him, and as luck would have it, he fell into a coma. And now we need to somehow find his last victim before she dies (the ingenious mechanism set up by the maniac works flawlessly even in his absence). But the last and main component - the passive victim herself does not count - a beautiful lady who will be guided not by reason and professional duty, but by intuition. Naturally, she will save the victim. Everything will end well, evil will be punished, and good will triumph; besides, He (the FBI man) and She (the Savior) in the last frames, before the curtain is shamefully lowered, will feel a vague feeling for each other... In short, the matter is clear: we have all seen more than a dozen such films. The closest analogue is Jonathan Demme's scandalous thriller The Silence of the Lambs, which became the progenitor of an entire genre.
So the question arises: why the hell should we once again repeat what was chewed, swallowed, worked out and regurgitated back? Some explanations are obvious - for example, since we are talking about a Hollywood film, demand creates supply. Well, what can you do - the viewer loves such films; and it would be a sin not to take advantage of such love. In addition, “The Cage” is a completely honest film that does not pretend to be innovative; In general, a quality genre film. But honesty in itself is not worth a penny, since it cannot serve as an excuse for secondary behavior. Therefore, the director of the film, Tarsem Singh, deliberately turns it into an example of subtle style. American cinema has always had enough strong plots and suspense; but the catastrophic lack of flair and taste was never able to completely reconcile the European viewer with Hollywood. “The Cage” is a brave attempt to come in from the back door, to defeat an opponent (or at least compete with him on equal terms) on his own field. There is nothing specifically European in the film, but the very attention to cinematic details, to the sophistication and refinement of form, even at the expense of content, is indicative. Or maybe there is no damage: “The Cage” is a kind of experiment, the purpose of which is to find the boundaries of the genre, to understand what can be included in it without breaking the canons. It turns out that form - also known as style - can become a purely semantic component of an otherwise ordinary American thriller.
Let's start with the selection of characters and performers. Hollywood, despite all the mutations, is still attentive to the sacred act of casting, and in this case it is more than justified. The main role and a kind of symbol of “The Cage” is Jennifer Lopez , who played psychiatrist Catherine Dean, initially a model, then a singer, and part-time actress. Suffice it to say that Lopez’s rise as an actor began thanks to one of the most stylish directors in the United States, Steven Soderbergh, in the post-Tarantino crime drama “Out of Sight” she made a duet with George Clooney. Jennifer holds the bar - here she appears either in snow-white angelic robes, or in a futurological flexible spacesuit, and her transformations are countless - satin crinolines, fantasy feathers, urban jeans; a delicate face in a fashionable “Latin” style, an impeccable figure... All this is layered onto the role of a medium who falls into a trance in order to heal the sick. It is characteristic that the “Stephen King” theme is brought into the picture by the beautiful model, to whom even the psychological game according to Stanislavsky is not entirely accessible. Fortunately, this is not required.
The male part of the ensemble was chosen to match Lopez, and chosen well. Vincent D'Onofrio and Vince Vaughn could easily switch places, although one is indeed more of a normative law enforcement "good guy" and the other a maniac. However, a good stylist can handle any metamorphosis; something else is more important: the apparent impeccability of the beautiful Dean-Lopez (it doesn’t matter at all whether she seems beautiful to you; this is the director’s concept, and you can’t spit against him) should be set off by average American actors. This is what happens. The assassin Karl Stargher and the knight Peter Novak are typical characters in atypical circumstances. The atypicality of which is determined both by the presence of the unearthly Katherine-Jennifer, and by the will of the puppeteer Singh.
It's time to move on to the director. Tarsem Singh is another Hollywood debutant of exotic blood, who decided to update a boring genre through purely stylistic twists. And he did it at least as well as M. Night Shyamalan did in The Sixth Sense . At least in the absence of any pretense of culture shock; “The Cage” bears the distinct imprint of the creative will of the music video director, who entertains the audience with beautiful or scary pictures. One of Singh's most famous videos is the textbook "Losing my religion" REM. Undoubtedly, the founders of American alternative rock of the 90s owe a significant part of their fame to Singh's apocalyptic mini-masterpiece. Deep thoughts about the loss of religion remained on the conscience of the rockers - the director took responsibility only for the visual side. Exactly the same situation is evident in “The Cage”. “Don’t do it smartly, do it beautifully” - this is the motto of “The Cage”, which distinguishes it favorably not only from Shyamalan’s films, but also from the same “Silence of the Lambs”, ruined by the pretentiousness of the concept.
This, in fact, returns us to the initially proclaimed merit of the film - its honesty. Critics, both Western and ours, have already talked a lot about quotes from Fellini , Tarkovsky and Wenders . In the current intertextual space, if you wish, you can catch a quote from anyone anywhere, and the poor directors are already guilty of having once watched good other people’s films, which was deposited in their subcortex. The point is not this, but the fact that the stylistic perfection of the mentioned classics was an artistic confirmation of their - more or less successful or deep - ideas. In the case of “The Cell,” a completely flat and standard story is made interesting and multifaceted solely thanks to the original style, consistent even in the smallest details. There is no plagiarism, and before the viewer’s eyes a new form of a familiar genre appears.
The novelty, first of all, is that Singh - and this is the third, last mention of his honesty - finally destroys the conditional agreement between the viewer and the director of the thriller about the reality of everything shown and seen on the screen. Stop pretending that saviors from the FBI and antichrists from dark corners actually exist. That is, they probably exist (you never know what happens), but they certainly don’t look like those we see in the movies. Singh destroys the old game and starts a new, fabulous, much more exciting one. Much of the film's action takes place in the subconscious. Dr. Dean and her colleagues cannot cure the immobilized child - entering his dreams does not help; Only the terrible experience of wandering in the dreams of a murderer who has fallen into a coma provides the key to solving the mystery. What's the secret? Obviously not where Stargher hid the innocent girl. The mystery - and this is also not explained, but shown, solved on a purely pictorial level - in dreams and control over them.
The eternal question: do dreams come from within or from without? True to the principle of not knowing the final truth, the director offers explanations to choose from. It is clear that Karl’s terrible memories of how his parents tortured him, how he was forcibly baptized (he almost choked), and his first unsuccessful sexual experiences determined the nature of his dreams, his actions in reality, and his virtual split into a downtrodden boy and a fantastic a bald tyrant in a purple robe. But it is also clear that the beautiful warrior-deliverer Catherine, and after her her vassal Peter, come into Karl’s dreams from the outside, and they manage to defeat evil, learn the truth and accept the last imaginary confession from the tormented soul of the killer.
The structure of a dream, recreated with frightening accuracy, is the main advantage of “The Cage”; All the successful images of the film that define its style were born from dreams. Distorted spatial perspectives in the spirit of Escher and Dali, Maeterlinckian estates and gardens, throne rooms a la Conan the Barbarian; unusual animals, one of which - the albino dog Carla - remains next to Catherine even after the finale. Why not the Mephistophelian black dog from Stalker ? By the way, Bergman wrote that Tarkovsky’s greatness is determined by one single factor: Tarkovsky managed in his films to destroy the line between reality and sleep. Without making a direct comparison, I will still note that “The Cage” is the second successful case of creating visual images of a dream in American mass cinema (the first was in Wes Craven’s “A Nightmare on Elm Street”). Dreams are the territory where pure style becomes a meaningful rather than a formal component. And this justifies any, even the most banal plot in the world.
In conclusion, it is important to add that you should not get carried away with style at the expense of meaning. After all, not everyone has a sense of style. A good example is Highlander 4: End Game , one of the most unsuccessful film projects of the year. Pure style, borrowed from a flawed series with a complete absence of an independent story, is a minus, not a plus. Put at least two, even ten good actors swinging swords in the interiors of Scottish castles and the exteriors of New York high-rises, the lack of motive for this swinging will be striking even to an inattentive viewer. In short, everyone should have their own voluntary cell, the boundaries of which coincide with the boundaries of good taste. And the wider the cage, the more obvious the danger of it turning into an ugly and smelly common cell.