Rutger Hauer in Bruegel-space in The Mill & The Cross.
* * * * (out of five stars) The Mill and the Cross. Written by Lech Majewski & Michael Francis Gibson. Directed by Lech Majewski.
The way they tell you to look at art in museums is all wrong. The preferred approach, certain experts say, is to forget about names, dates, and labels, and just look, letting the work “speak” to you directly. In other words, to stand back, relax, and let the latent power of the object simply wash over you. This is the attitude that makes us guilty when we read the labels at exhibitions before we’ve really confronted the artwork.
But the problem with this purely aesthetic approach is that art never speaks for itself. In most cases, it is the product of many particular choices, all of which were made in specific contexts that are personal, social, technological, political, etc.. To try to understand art without awareness of these choices—of who the artist was, when he or she lived, what he loved and what he loathed—is as absurd as, well, trying to understand a Renaissance nativity scene without any knowledge of Christianity. For this reason, I’m a believer in labels.
It may still be possible to appreciate Peter Bruegel’s 1564 painting “The Procession to Calvary” without seeing Lech Majewski’s remarkable The Mill and the Cross first—but I wouldn’t recommend it. Using CGI, Polish director Majewski lets us into the masterpiece in the most literal sense possible, by rendering it into a three-dimensional world in which Bruegel’s figures live, love, and die. Indeed, Bruegel (Rutger Hauer) himself is a character here, puttering amongst the tortured denizens of his passion landscape, sketchbook in hand, explaining his thoughts and purposes to his nervous patron (Michael York). It may be the most elaborate museum label yet devised.
In subject and tone, Majewski’s film is reminiscent of the art historical phantasmagoria of Peter Greenaway (The Draughtsman’s Contract, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover). And certainly, in the way Majewski and screenwriter Michael Francis Gibson reflect how Bruegel mashes up his vision of the Roman-era Crucifixion with the politics of Flanders at the time of the Spanish Inquisition, Mill has a kind of period timelessness, a temporal indeterminacy, that is vaguely Greenaway-eque. But unlike Greenaway, Majewski isn’t fond of dropping allusions or posing riddles. Instead of graduate-level intellectual self-importance, Mill aims at an elegant, almost architectural concreteness. “Like the spider web, I will build my composition from certain anchoring points,” explains Bruegel. And so he does. “Instead of God looking down disapproving from the clouds, his place will be taken by the miller,” he says, indicating the wind-mill that looms over his otherwise godless composition, grinding away its harvest of human misery.
Fair warning: Mill isn’t for everybody. Though it features a cast of internationally recognizable actors like Hauer (Blade Runner), York, and Charlotte Rampling, there are no dramatic scenes here, no dialog except interior monologs. Nothing really happens. Like a painting (and paradoxically for a film), it unfolds more in space than in time.
But as a sensual experience, this is something truly unique. Majewski has not only put us into “Bruegel-space” here, with the artist’s signature mountain-scapes stretching into the distance. He also painstaking recreates the colors of a sixteenth-century painting, with their particular kind of purity and saturation. All this is thanks to the use of CGI not to destroy the Earth for the umpteenth time, or make hobbits come alive yet again, but in a truly imaginative way. Not to be missed.
© 2011 Nicholas Nicastro
No comments:
Post a Comment