FIRST LOVE

The movie Columbus, shot on site in the Indiana city, is about a young woman who has trouble leaving her home and her hometown, where she’s tantalized by the celebrated modern monuments around her. When a well-known professor of architecture is hospitalized there, his son and his protege visit, befriend her, and hatch a plan.

The movie is shot almost entirely in one-point perspective, an optical scheme in which all orthogonal lines meet at a fixed point on the horizon, so the viewer is always looking flat onto a surface or deeply into a space. It’s a vantage that gives the city’s iconic twentieth-century buildings a grave formal beauty. The landscapes, lush late-summer lawns and ancient hardwood trees, are rendered similarly. The scenes, firmly and quietly composed, hold the buildings and grounds still so the characters can roam freely in front of them.

The story unfolds slowly with generous spaces and silences that are unusual in an American film. We see that the young woman does not feel secure, the son does not feel loved, and the protege stifles any feelings that might arise. We see that all three characters are slightly unmoored and slightly enamored of one another. They move together and then apart, until they reach a kind of social detente.

Columbus is the only movie I know that shows what it’s like to love a building. Not to find supreme beauty in it, but to be sustained by it. Each night the young woman leaves the home she shares with her mother and drives to Deborah Berke’s Irwin Union Bank, a small, elegant building with a bold parti and deceptively banal detailing. At night its upper floor – a glowing cantilevered bar – casts a cool blue light across the lot below, where the heroine sits on the hood of her car. This building is the only one part of her world that makes sense, that is correctly ordered, that gives her a home. This is a power of architecture, to hold one together, that’s rarely expressed.

Deborah Berke Partners, Irwin Union Bank, Columbus IN, 2009

May 05, 2020 by Nalina Moses

UPON ANOTHER TIME

Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is many things: a shoot ‘em up, a buddy film, a nostalgia trip, a revisionist history, and mostly, an essay about the fickle and devastating movement of time. The film, which runs over two and a half hours and never flags, shows how times past (fictional, historical, personal) course inextricably through the present. To paraphrase Faulkner, the past is never past, even when remembered incorrectly.

As the movie, set in 1969 and framed around the Manson murders, marches towards its ugly conclusion, we spend time with three Los Angeles movie industry characters: past-his-prime television actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), Dalton’s stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), and Dalton’s neighbor Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie). Each time we drop in on one we are served, in bright, lithe, brilliantly constructed flashbacks, a glimpse at the events that brought them to this point. As Tate watches herself fight in a movie, she remembers training for the stunts. As Doug meets a young television star, he relives a major failed audition. As Cliff fixes the antenna on the roof of Doug’s house, he recalls a life-altering conflict with is ex-wife. These memories flare up instantly and seamlessly, slicing cleanly through the present and then dropping the viewer right back into it. They lend depth to the main narrative without pulling it off on shaggy paths.

There has been criticism about the way Tate is portrayed here, as a glowy, speechless feminine archetype: smiling, dancing, driving on the freeway. But Rick and Cliff too are pictured mainly in small moments, many sadly domestic. We see Doug cracking eggs and making frozen margaritas, and we see Cliff opening cans of dog food and making macaroni and cheese. As a counterpoint, we witness all three of these characters in small triumphs. Tate hears a movie theater audience laugh at her on-screen pratfall. Cliff beats up an unsuspecting martial arts star on a Hollywood backlot. And Rick reshapes trite bag-guy dialogue to steal a scene. It’s in these small moments – often mundane – that they make themselves and their lives. Tate, as we see her, is young woman going about her days: running errands, meeting friends, listening to records. It’s an honorable way to depict her, or anyone.

August 20, 2019 by Nalina Moses

BOXED IN

In Alex Garland’s movie Ex Machina a tech mogul isolates himself inside his remote forest retreat, then gets busy prototyping life-like female robots endowed with artificial intelligence and something very close to artificial emotion. The movie was filmed at the Juvet Hotel in Norway, designed by Jensen & Skodvin, and this structure stands perfectly for the mogul’s values: physical and psychic isolation.

The hotel, comprised of several smaller buildings, is not much to look at from the outside. Its box-like suites, the size of suburban garages, are clad in dark wood siding and, in select spots, with full-height glazing. These windows allow spectacular views of untrammeled forest into the rooms, which are furnished in an opulent version of Scandinavian minimalism.

The mogul never steps outside, and spends much of his waking hours in the airless basement workshop. He works out obsessively and works obsessively, and that’s about it. During the day views of the trees, mountains and river rush inside, like dazzling images on the greatest HD screen. At night everything goes dark, and the rooms feel like bunkers.

I can remember visiting an apartment in the Dakota years ago, on a wet fall day, and stepping out onto the turret balcony to see all of Central Park spread out before me. I felt like a medieval queen, with the wind pulling at my coat, birds circling above, and my dominion below. For centuries that power of survey – of looking and taking in what is yours – has been a measure of power. Now power might be what this mogul has – looking out onto a landscape without having, or wanting, any relationship to it. Nature is just another image. As the mogul concocts a female – for companionship and service – he holds the rest of the world at bay.

August 17, 2019 by Nalina Moses

A LIVING THING

Joanna Hogg’s movie Exhibition unfolds almost entirely inside a London house built by architect James Melvin in 1969 and renovated by Sauerbruch Hutton in the 1990′s. It has a brown-brick facade with ribbon windows, and open interiors with wood floors and a narrow steel spiral stair. From the outside it’s incredibly modest, the kind of building you wouldn’t look twice at unless you spotted someone at one of the windows or walking out the door. From the inside it’s generous, with more space and light than a typical city home. During the renovation, lacquered sliding doors were added along the perimeter of each floor to define rooms. Their colors (fuschia, bubble gum pink, dove grey) are jarring but, somehow, entirely correct.

The movie is a high-bourgeois melodrama, about an artist couple whose relationship suffers quiet crises. The house is an exquisite shell that protects them from the noise, dirt, and bustle of the city, and from “real life” itself. There are signs of money and good taste everywhere: a Mini in the driveway, piles of art books in the living room, an Airbook in the studio, and an Alessi teapot and Marc Newson dish drainer on the kitchen counter.

But the movie never gives us authoritative, envy-inducing, Architectural Digest-style views of the house. Instead it gives glimpses into its spaces and inner workings. The husband tends to the house assiduously, sweeping water from the roof, checking the boiler and the elevator shaft. The wife is preternaturally sensitive to its movements: the switching on of vents, the clicking of locks, the creaks of foundations. Though photographed ecstatically, in still, exquisitely composed frames, the house is more than a luxury object; it’s a pulsating, living thing.

Photograph by Helene Binet, courtesy of Suaerbruch Hutton.

May 25, 2015 by Nalina Moses