1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 66: Microcosmos

“A documentary on insect life in meadows and ponds” (IMDb).

I’ll try to be brief. This is the rare masterpiece about which the less is said, the better.

First, what it isn’t: a documentary in David Attenborough’s vein. No attempt is made to explain why these creatures are designed as they are, why they behave as they do, or how they are connected to the ecosystem. This is no sociological treatise. It doesn’t exist to sway one’s opinions or to add to one’s store of knowledge.

Very few words are spoken. They are in French.

There is an English version, narrated by Kristin Scott Thomas:

A meadow in early morning, somewhere on Earth. Hidden here is a world as vast as our own, where the weeds are like impenetrable jungles, the stones are mountains, and even the smallest pond becomes an ocean. Time passes differently here: an hour is like a day, a day is like a season, and the passing of a season is a lifetime. But to observe this world, we must fall silent now, and listen to its murmurs.

The creatures and their habitat remain alien, exotic. Perhaps the movie makes them more so. Dragonflies and bees, grasses and flowers and puddles, are so closely and brightly photographed that they look glossy and artificial, as if they were insect-mannequins perched upon display furniture. (By comparison, their synthetic counterparts in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids appear grittily realistic.) But if magnification makes real insects seem curiously more and less genuine, it also bestows personality on their movements. A viewer is tempted to ascribe human-like intentionity to these bugs – and, also, to the plants, which, in speeded-up sequences, curl themselves up or spread themselves out, or wrap themselves around hapless pollinators.

There is music: classical, new-age. There are idyllic panoramic shots. Surprisingly, it matters that the movie is French: I kept half-expecting to glimpse, at the bottom of the screen, that ant-like, Sisyphean pseudo-peasant, Jean de Florette, hauling building materials across a meadow. The lighting at close range is vivid, if not harsh; at a distance, it is softer, not so unlike the lighting and focus of those gorgeous, delicately pervy, tedious offerings of David Hamilton, that English confectioner of French nubile skin.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My reaction, the first time I viewed Microcosmos, was ho-hum. I’d been hoping for years to see it, ever since it was reviewed by Siskel & Ebert. One afternoon, the Cornell Cinema screened it for children. When I sat down, I noticed a fellow grad student ushering his large brood across the theater row in front of mine. The excited children settled in; the lights were dimmed; clouds appeared on the screen, landscapes came into view, and the first insect protagonists did their numbers. Soon, I was asleep. I slept through the rest of the movie (it isn’t long).

I revisited it last night with Samuel and Daniel, who, insect-like, climbed up and down the furniture and my person the whole while. Even so, they paid attention. Samuel is still talking about Microcosmos today. I, too, itch to see it again.

It’s a good movie to chill out to.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 22: The English patient

There was an unconventional Hungarian aristocrat named László Almásy who explored the Sahara in the 1930s. He had love affairs and died before he was old, but not in the spectacular fashion of Count Almásy of The English Patient.

The fictional Almásy (Ralph Fiennes) finds himself rolling across the desert in a (proto-) jeep with young Mrs. Katharine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas). She is talkative. He is quiet. She asks: How does a count make his way from the castle to the desert? Almásy replies:

I once traveled with a guide who was taking me to Faya. He didn’t speak for nine hours. At the end of it, he pointed at the horizon and said, “Faya.” That was a good day.

His answer is evasive. He already is in love with Katharine, whose husband is assisting him with his geographic expedition.

Almásy does what he can to keep himself at arm’s length from Katharine. Then they are caught in a sandstorm. It gathers quietly in the distance, obscuring the stars. Minutes later, Almásy and Katharine are forced to shelter together for the night while the sand beats against the jeep’s windows.

It is too much for Almásy. He strokes Katharine’s hair.

ALMÁSY: “Let me tell you about winds. There is a whirlwind from southern Morrocco, the aajej, against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives. And there is the ghibli, from Tunis …”

KATHARINE: “The ghibli !!!”

ALMÁSY: “The ghibli, which rolls and rolls and rolls and produces a rather strange nervous condition. And then there is the harmattan, a red wind, which mariners call the Sea of Darkness. And red sand from this wind has flown as far as the south coast of England, apparently producing showers so dense that they were mistaken for blood.”

KATHARINE: “Fiction! We have a house on that coast and it has never, never rained blood.”

ALMÁSY: “No, it’s all true. Herodotus, your friend. He writes about it. And he writes about a wind, the simoon, which a nation thought was so evil they declared war on it and marched out against it. In full battle dress. Their swords raised.”

There are scenes of such poetry all through The English Patient. Some of it is verbal; much is visual. The desert is a frequent backdrop. It is likened in different scenes to a human body, to a rumpled bedsheet, a slab of rock, a strip of parchment. As Shine is obsessed with the different appearances and meanings of drops of water, The English Patient showcases sand dunes and grains of sand.

Like Shine, again, The English Patient shifts backward and forward through time. Almásy’s moments with Katharine are deathbed recollections. He has been severely burned, and his lungs are failing. Mistaken for an Englishman, he is in Italy at the close of the Second World War, being cared for in an abandoned villa by Hana (Juliette Binoche), a French-Canadian nurse who has dropped out of her British military convoy to see this patient through his last days. Hana’s lover has just been killed; in Almásy, she recognizes a person similarly bereaved. She asks for his memories, which he divulges intermittently – as they return to him – or perhaps as he chooses to let others know them.

The villa gathers more occupants. Two are bomb disposal experts (the land is littered with mines). Another (Willem Dafoe) is a shadowy figure who calls himself Caravaggio. He, too, urges Almásy to recollect his past.

It is an international group, most of whose members are Britons in name only. Just one of the bomb disposers is fully English. The other (Naveen Andrews) is from India. He serves his colonizer with a certain wariness. Hana is more French than British. Caravaggio, ostensibly another Canadian, turns out to have spent most of his life in North Africa. Almásy, of course, is not an Englishman at all but has merely been taken for one. (In other circumstances, he has been taken for a German – no small matter during the Second World War.) Almásy himself hates the idea that countries claim ownership over land and people. It becomes clear why he might have chosen to leave his castle for an unmarked, largely ignored patch of desert.

This is an extraordinarily rich movie, splashing romance and history over startlingly scenic canvases. At one pole of the story is Hana, Almásy’s nurse, who freely gives of herself (in her first scene, she kisses a wounded soldier just because he asks her to). The other polar character is Almásy, who hates the idea of ownership, of being owned by others. It might more cynically be put that he believes in his absolute ownership of himself. What has been said of John Locke (by D.A. Lloyd Thomas) might also be said of Almásy: he is

perhaps one of those people who wish to protect a private place from everyone else. He [is] jealous of his independence and autonomy, and not only intellectually committed to the doctrine that persons own themselves.

The English Patient is one of the best artistic studies of this type of person. It is one of the very best movies in a good year.