天知道

VENICE – The days of The Panic in Needle Park, to name one iconic New York City drug movie, seem long gone, now that most of Manhattan’s one-time junkie hangouts have been gentrified to within an inch of their lives. But in Heaven Knows What, Josh and Benny Safdie rescue that subculture from the invisible margins. They weave a small group of young heroin addicts into the fabric of the city streets with a grubby lyricism that’s visually intoxicating even if its emotional impact remains somewhat muted.
Following their detour into unconventional sports documentary with Lenny Cooke, the sibling filmmaker team returns to the scruffy aesthetic, raw authenticity and unstrung characters of their first feature, Daddy Longlegs.
Their new slice of life on the fringes is often hard to watch due to the pain, self-destructiveness and even the numbing Warholian monotony of the existences it depicts with a verite candor that owes much to John Cassavetes. But the film, which at times also recalls the lo-fi work of Gus Van Sant, is laced with moments of surprising poignancy, goofy low-key farce and even a weird kind of charm. It’s also distinguished by an intense screen-acting debut from Arielle Holmes, playing an unflinching version of herself and her own experience.
While the movie’s theatrical prospects are slim, the triple showcase of Venice, Toronto and New York Film Festival slots should help build a platform for VOD exposure.
Ronald Bronstein, memorable as the less-than-model parent in Daddy Longlegs, wrote the screenplay with Josh Safdie, based on Holmes’ unpublished memoir, Mad Love in New York City. She plays Harley, a homeless drug addict in an obsessive on-off relationship with Ilya (Caleb Landry Jones), whose nihilistic indifference extends to encouraging her suicidal impulses. That results in Harley slashing her wrist and landing in Bellevue in a mesmerizing sequence, played without dialogue and flooded with unsettling synth scoring.
Among the film’s most impressive qualities is the Safdie brothers’ boldly textural use of music — predominantly Isao Tomita‘s electronica versions of Debussy, but also a little Tangerine Dream and James Dashow, as well as some hardstyle and black metal.
The other standout element is Sean Price Williams‘ woozy cinematography, which hugs in close to the characters or sits back from a detached p.o.v., often shooting them in a bleached haze of light. They bleed into the visual field of sidewalks, storefronts, cars and pedestrians. This is not a portrait of New York’s junkie street subculture conveniently tucked into some skeevy pocket of the city. Instead they move freely, sometimes chafing against their surroundings, through libraries, Internet cafes, bookstores and fast-food joints.
The loose narrative tracks Harley’s half-hearted attempts to get by without Ilya. She brushes off the advances of abrasive Skully (rapper Necro) and slips into a friendship with Mike (Buddy Duress), an amusingly verbose dealer and fellow addict; he keeps her in smack but bristles when she can’t pay, his tenderness shifting to hostility.
While there’s a suggestion of a romantic triangle in Harley’s oscillations between Ilya and Mike, the Safdies are less interested in story or character than in immersing us in a milieu that most people would prefer to ignore. The film observes Harley and her cohorts “spanging,” street vernacular for begging, be it for spare change or subway entry; or stealing from a mailman’s bag, sifting through the contents for gift cards or cash.
A joyride on the motorcycle of Mike’s drug supplier Antoine (Benjamin Antoine Hampton) hints at momentary escape. But when the possibility of real deliverance surfaces via a hastily planned bus journey to Florida with the unpredictable Ilya, that notion is revealed to be an empty hope.
Heaven Knows What is a strange film, at once distancing and transfixing. If it’s not as impactful as it might have been considering the experiences portrayed, it has potent atmosphere and an admirable refusal to put any kind of gloss on the bleak reality of its limbo world. It also helps that Holmes, Jones and Duress, as well as the mainly non-actors in secondary roles, all inhabit their characters with real conviction.
Production companies: Iconoclast, Elara Pictures
Cast: Arielle Holmes, Caleb Landry Jones, Buddy Duress, Necro, Eleonore Hendricks, Yuri Pleskun, Benjamin Antoine Hampton, Diana Singh
Directors: Josh and Benny Safdie
Screenwriters: Ronald Bronstein, Josh Safdie, based on the novel, “Mad Love in New York City,” by Arielle Holmes
Producers: Oscar Boyson, Sebastian Bear-McClard
Executive producers: Charles-Marie Anthonioz, Mourad Belkeddar, Jean Duhamel, Nicolas Lhermitte
Director of photography: Sean Price Williams
Production designer: Audrey Tanner
Editors: Benny Safdie, Ronald Bronstein
Sales: ICM
No rating, 94 minutes.

http://tieba.baidu.com/p/3264279263

Another film about junkies? That question almost inevitably follows one’s learning the subject of Josh and Benny Safdie’s New York-set drama “Heaven Knows What,” and its main implication is clear: heroin addiction is at once so limited and so overdone as a narrative premise that filmmakers approaching it need to have something new to say, or to show.



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Unfortunately, the Safdies don’t. Their film is the latest in a long line of movies that seem to assume the milieu of addiction is justification enough for its existence. The result is a work that—like a whole sub-species of French films of the recent decades—fetishizes its own hyper-naturalistic visual style and performances (all but one by non-actors) while offering no original or striking insights into the world it portrays.

No doubt the film’s surface attractions and its core weaknesses both owe to its origins. Reportedly, the Safdies were researching a project in New York’s diamond district when they spotted a pretty young blonde who they assumed might be a Russian diamond worker. Turns out she was a heroin addict from New Jersey named Arielle Holmes who had a troubled romantic relationship with another addict named Ilya.

Fascinated by Holmes’ stories of her street life, the Safdies persuaded her to write an account of it, a manuscript that became the basis for their screenplay (co-written by Ronald Bronstein). With Holmes playing Harley, a character who apparently differs from herself in name only, the filmmakers shot in the neighborhoods she frequented using people she knew as secondary characters and hidden cameras to disguise their presence (a technique also employed in Oren Moverman’s forthcoming “Time Out of Mind,” about a New York homeless man).

The look, of course, is very close to that of a documentary, which raises the question: Why isn’t “Heaven Knows What” a documentary? If conveying the reality of junkie life was the main objective, that course might have been more productive. As in many other cases, turning real-life material into drama can produce an awkward hybrid: a film in which the reality is diluted by fictionalization, while the fiction is rendered thin and sometimes clichéd due to being shackled to its real-life origins.

So it is here. When we first see Harley, she’s in full hyperactive mode, threatening suicide to the long-haired, plainly doped-up Ilya (Caleb Landry Jones), who’s far more interested in the public computer he’s staring at. She’s so desperately in love that she wants to sacrifice her life for him. His groggy response: If you want to prove your love, go ahead and off yourself.

One gets the feeling this pathetic little melodrama among the drug-addled has been having a long run. Soon enough, though, Harley makes good on her morbid proposal, buying a razor at a bodega and cutting her wrist in a park with Ilya looking on. Whisked to a hospital, she’s left with only some nasty-looking stitches as proof of her love.

For a while thereafter, thankfully, Ilya disappears from her life and two other guys take his place. Skully (rapper Necro) is a burly dude in a baseball cap who offers to treat her well and help her out, though it seems like he might have other agendas as well. She, in any case, isn’t interested in being courted with kind behavior and rebuffs him.

Far more important is the relationship with Mike (Buddy Duress), who also seems to want to help her but is constantly exasperated by her neediness, unreliability and demands for both dope and credit. Unlike Skully, he evidences no romantic feelings for Harley—though he plainly despises Ilya, a point that becomes more important later in the story—but is nevertheless bound to her by their never-ending rounds of scoring, shooting up and finding places to crash.

Though the protagonists here end up in hospitals repeatedly, there are no doctors, therapists or social workers as characters. Nor are there parents, family members, non-junkie friends, police officers or similar. The film keeps its characters in a tightly circumscribed bubble of junkie-dom, and that’s one thing that makes it feel a bit phony, less a probing, realistic view of a complex milieu than one that partakes of the junkies’ own gauzy self-involvement as well as previous fictions’ oblique romanticizing of them.

Given the film’s relative weakness on the narrative level, its performances become all the more important, and here the news is largely good. For a first-timer, Holmes is amazingly assured and precise. Landry Jones’ mopey, narcissistic Ilya, meanwhile, is solid and convincing, though not as extraordinary as his turn in John Boorman’s “Queen and Country” earlier this year. The stand-out, though, is Buddy Duress’ Mike. Though it’s clear the reputed “street legend” is not an experienced actor, his work has a force and rough authenticity that make it edgily compelling, his mannerisms and vocal intonations sometimes recalling the young Elliott Gould.

A stand-out of another sort is the camerawork of Sean Price Williams. Using understated lighting, long lenses both outdoors and in close-quartered interiors, and near-constant re-framings, this gifted cinematographer turns in a bravura performance that fully realizes the naturalistic intent of the Safdies’ stylistic approach. That such verité-like verisimilitude can’t substitute for dramatic truth is an obvious truism, but Willliams’ sharp work offers its own elegant justifications.


http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/heaven-knows-what-2015

Ruben Östlund携《自由广场》(The Square)摘得刚结束的第70届戛纳电影节主竞赛单元金棕榈奖。荧幕场刊给出了2.7的分数，低于排行第一的《无爱可诉》(Нелюбовь)，最后突出重围的《你从未在此》(You Were Never Really Here)，与Todd Haynes的《寂静中的惊奇》(Wonderstruck)持平，并列第三。

《无爱可诉》试图将镜头对焦于俄罗斯中产阶级现状，通过一出亲子关系的悲情戏投射于莫斯科阴郁且冷漠的普通家庭。《自由广场》则是对中产知识分子的讽刺：主人公Christian在影片中发生的桥段来自于身边朋友的生活，身份为当代艺术博物馆策展人的他在其中自嘲又自解，化解着内心的存在主义危机。《你从未在此》是我在将来的半年内最期待看到的影片，不仅仅是因为久未登场的Joaquin Phoenix（三年前连续轰炸的《她》(Her),《性本恶》(Inherent Vice)让我看腻最近又有些想念他），还有曾带着《凯文怎么了》(We Need To Talk About Kevin)强势回归大众视野的英国女导演Lynne Ramsay，此去一别，又是六年……

当然，最令人觉得兴趣盎然是Safdie兄弟的《好时光》(Good Time)，荧幕场刊2.6分，风格延续前作《天知道》(Heaven Knows What)，代入感强烈的碰撞在街头，心碎又满怀希望。

《天知道》将镜头对准纽约城市街头海洛因上瘾的年轻女孩Harley(Arielle Holmes饰演，她也是剧本的原创作者……一个有故事的girl?)，她深爱着自己的前男友Ilya并在注射海洛因的情绪诱导之后不惜为其当街割腕。出院后彻彻底底成为了一个接头流浪汉，在街边乞讨，用偷骗来的钱消费毒品与酒精……影片在结尾并没有对剧中出现的所有或好或坏的问题给出解决方案，没有正确错误的主观判断。兜兜转转回到了片子开头时候的原点，就像其中瘾君子的生活一样，找不到出路。

《天知道》的重要意义在于它如此真实的还原了一场令人心碎的不愉快经历，并无关于故事背景与未来发展，这一切都是当下的。也是因为Ben Safdie如此注重故事的真实感与社会性，在观赏电影的96分钟里，你会感觉Ilya与Harley都在触手可及的生活中，不断的与他们擦肩而过。我们一同成为了镜头背后的“观察者”，这一身份本身的意义就是不带有价值观处理的功能的。深焦、近景、手持的特写、快速移动的模糊背景……就这样进入了社会边缘人的生活，会有些许不适，会因为打斗而坐立不安，闭上眼睛不去看针管进入皮肤的尽头，同时又在怀疑着自由与社会制度共存的可能性——它们能够达到某种平衡吗？

值得一提的是，独立音乐人Ariel Pink用自己敏锐的观察力协助影像，为电影音乐的处理提供了一种全新的方法：全景式、电子化，本身就像极了一款听觉LSD。Arielle Holmes作为影片文本的原本创作者，自己演出自己的故事，本身也是Ben Safdie及整个创作团队对于作者性的尊重。《天知道》的出现重新定义了在荧幕前的我们与影像可以保持的距离，让我们沉浸在寻常生活体会不到的热烈中，如此直接和真实。

另：推荐Ariel Pink的专辑Pom Pom，惹人喜爱。