Tully Russian Ark
Cooper, Rand Richards
SCREEN Rand Richards Cooper SLOW MOTION 'Tully' & 'Russian Ark' Hully, an independent film by first-time director Hilary Birmingham, is all about pace. Slow pace. Meditative and meandering, this...
...Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark represents a movie hallmark, the longest continuous shot in the history of film...
...Does Ella think he's the type to settle down...
...Traditionally, film canister capacity has limited the length of a take to less than fifteen minutes...
...asks in a pensive moment...
...Then again, 1990 seems like just yesterday to me...
...the previous record was a ten-minute shot in Hitchcock's Rope...
...It's a limiting point of view: you keep waiting for a cut or jump or fade, and it doesn't come...
...Her subtitle could be Men Who Won't Talk...
...This is advice that Birmingham and her co-writer, Matt Drake, could have followed more closely...
...We're led by an eighteenth-century figure in a velvet frock, known as "The European," who seems to have awakened in the building, much to his own bafflement, and an offscreen narrator who mumbles semi-audibly, repeating and rebutting the other man's derisive criticisms of Russian culture...
...Even more surreal is knowing how the movie was made...
...There's so much more out there...
...In a continuous take of this length, the camera becomes a character, offering a point of view, rather than material for a composition...
...The farmer's past turns out to be rather more complicated than he has let on...
...Tully's so handsome (and heartthrob actor Anson Mount has the requisite face), he's almost a joke in town...
...It's ail about pace...
...If it all sounds familiar, well, it is...
...This means that any glitch, from actors blowing lines to Biittner stumbling, forces the whole tiling to start all over again-and in fact, three takes were blown before Sokurov got it right...
...I like thinking people can surprise you...
...Long widowed, his face deeply lined with years of hard work and harder worries, Coates has the look of a man used to bearing his troubles alone, and the threat to his farm sends him deep inside himself, hiding the news from his two grown sons, Tully Jr...
...The ambiguously happy ending, for instance-lovely, yes, but Birmingham has lifted it straight from Steven Soderbergh's 1990 Sex, Lies, and Videotape...
...The pleasures of this film are substantial, its aura one of sunlit sadness, but they have little to do with originality...
...Perhaps there is some metaphoric correspondence between such aesthetic observations and the nature of Russian history and empire...
...Tully records the slow-spreading ripples of a long-ago secret...
...Of course, Ella does get the attraction...
...A little slower, please...
...But the making of the film provides a drama all its own...
...and Earl, who run the place with him...
...All women melt on cue when he smiles -all, that is, except Ella (Julianne Nicholson), a college grad spending the summer at home before going off to veterinary school...
...What else is he hiding...
...a ninety-six-minute-long gulp of images, it's the mother of all single takes...
...We wander through private moments in the lives of Russian aristocrats, such as Nicholas and Alexandra at dinner with their children, then into another room, where twenty-first century Russians gaze at the museum displays, and finally into a grand ballroom, where a colossal cast decked out in period-piece eighteenth-century costumes enact a formal state ball...
...In Russian Ark, cameraman Tilman Biittner (Run Lola Run) used a state-of-the-art digital video camera that saved its footage to a portable hard drive...
...You know you're middle aged when a director's deep formative influence was a film made by someone you think of as a whiz kid...
...Though she's loathe to admit it, if s obvious to us, and we spend the movie watching the two find each other-his dawning appreciation of something more than sexiness, her appeal to a sensitivity hidden behind the good looks and macho posturing...
...The "plot" consists of a fantasy tour through the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, former home of the Russian czars, today a vast museum of Russian history and art...
...My guess is that she saw Soder-bergh's film as a teenager and was wowed...
...The script feels purposefully underwritten, especially Tully Sr.'s part, a man whose most extensive interaction is with a cashier at the grocery-a slightly younger woman named Claire, who adores him and longingly tries to draw him out from his grim, wounded stoicism...
...Hrom the Cinematic Stunt Department: Remember last year's Memento, Christopher Nolan's flashy experiment in discontinuity, a film noir chopped up into pieces arranged chronologically backward...
...Birmingham's evocation of rural Midwestern life relies on elements burnished by frequent cinematic use to a high gloss of myth: the golden cornfields obscuring the view...
...in a formal sense, the artfulness of this film lies in how it obliterates the art of film...
...You hold your breath...
...You need a new vice," she hints as he hands over $3.59 for his weekly six-pack of beer...
...I don't get it," she tells him, attempting insolence...
...the torpid summer afternoons on the porch or at the swimming hole, set to an opera of crickets...
...the lonely white farmhouse...
...Willowy and freckled, thoughtful and earnest, she's a wholesome counterpoint to the flashy girls Tully dates, like the tough stripper he's currently involved with...
...Trying hard to escape this dreary legacy is Tully Coates Jr., the ruggedly handsome older son...
...The story concerns a farmer, Tully Coates, who out of the blue learns that a collection agency has placed a $300,000 lien on his farm...
...It's lazy thinking...
...the reckless pathos of beer-drinking and heavy flirting at the bar in town...
...Well, get ready, because here comes the opposite...
...Sokurov tumbles together an anachronistic series of scenes and images...
...Better to sit back and take it in as a cinematic high-wire act, simultaneously breathtaking and agonizingly slow...
...The claustrophobic, tied-down feeling reveals how big a liberation film composition is from perspective...
...As with any stunt, you'll be fine as long as you ask the right questions, focusing not on content, but on form...
...As for the content of Russian Ark, well, I found the glowing notices that lured me in, from Roger Ebert's ("a glorious experience") to the New York Times's Stephen Holden's ("a magnificent conjuring act"), to be laughable-a serious case, you might say, of the emperor's new clothes...
...and Tully Jr.'s sudden, shy eloquence about the symbolism of a radio beacon blinking red against the night sky, which as a boy he took as a promise of communication with the world, some world, beyond town...
...Russian Ark is surreal in conception...
...What the big attraction is...
...doesn't need to be told about all those vices, especially not the girl kind...
...Tully Jr...
...In his early twenties, Tully Jr...
...Meditative and meandering, this small, quiet movie presents a tale of patrimony and brotherly rivalry in a rural Midwestern milieu so changeless it could be from 1950...
...Ella mistrusts and resents Tully's seductive charms...
...In concrete terms, he strolled through the Hermitage with his Stead-icam strapped on, and what he saw is what we get...
...She's interested in the topic of men without women: the husband who has lost his wife, the sons who grow up without their mother, and what happens to them...
...The setup recalls the farm-crisis dramas of the 1980s, like Country, or the populist films of John Sayles (who appears in an uncredited cameo), except that Birmingham plays the looming foreclosure entirely for its personal, as opposed to political, reverberations...
...I don't like thinking about people as types," she answers...
...Never will another film so tantalize the how, while so demoralizing the what and why...
...With a cast of nearly two thousand actors in thirty-three rooms, the logistics are monumental...
...But I wouldn't bother trying to discover such meanings amid the aimless and pedantic frivolities onscreen in' Russian Ark...
Vol. 130 • April 2003 • No. 8
