More aesthetic mysteries

The idea that one should hide art with art wasn’t just Rameau’s; it was widely discussed in the 18th century; C.P.E. Bach also wrote about it. The director of The Vertical Ray of the Sun may not have heard of it; or if he has, has chosen not expended enough art on the act of hiding.

There is certainly plenty of art here: all shots have been meticulously planned and painstakingly set up; colors and lights are fabulous; many camera angles are delightfully novel. Yet, the richness of all this art is a little overwhelming: oh no, one begins to think to himself halfway through the movie, here comes another incredible shot. There is a feeling of an exhausting succession of relentless Caravaggios; of insisting on making virtuoso love well past the moment of surfeit.

I don’t know why this should be irritating. It is certainly not due to the amount of visual richness: the film Sequins stands proof that relentless visual beauty need not tire the eye. (As does and the interior of Gesù, the embodied refutation of all the neoclassical preachery in favor of simplicity).

Perhaps it is irritating because the plot is dull and the acting wooden – which creates the aesthetic impression of setting a kidney stone in a gold and diamond ring. Yet wooden acting and dull stories do not kill other films – consider The Guardian of Buffalos, another Vietnamese art film, as an example of both, yet not visually irritating; or Bresson’s Lancelot, a satisfying example of the former; or Sequins again – a satisfying example of the latter. Perfectly good, visually gorgeous films can be made around the slimmest of plots. Nor are the film’s plots actually dull: each could have been made into a perfectly good drama.

Or perhaps it is irritating because the film glorifies its social setting – the fashionable and artistic classes of modern Hanoi – whose real life can not possibly be anywhere as pretty. Such aesthetic fantasies are easier to accept about mythically distant places – e.g. Lucknow in 1856 (The Chess Players) or New York ca. 1900 (Age of Innocence) than about familiar modernity. This film’s modern setting means that the carefully (and very beautifully) designed interiors feel like shots from a glossy modern interior design magazine: there is a whiff of commercial prettiness (‘look how pretty things are in Hanoi’), deadly however unjust. How this impression could have been avoided I do not know: would a preamble saying ‘this film takes place in Ubu, that is to say, nowhere’ have avoided the impression?

Neither explanation seems very good.

Certainly the plot is not told well. The stories seem boring, though they needn’t be – there is plenty of missed dramatic potential here.

I am not sure how the plot could be improved, but certainly some elements of the story-telling technique have misfired, like the ham-handed attempt at foreshadowing: early in the film someone explains a scene he is playing in a movie, which is a lover’s parting; the scene is then partly enacted; and then – used twice, verbatim later in the film to show the parting of two different sets of protagonists-lovers. Foreshadowing – something that worked so well in Kaos – here is so heavily, so obviously done that it raises not delight but – heckles. A good art film, like good advice, must leave plenty to the viewers’ intelligence. Good visual metaphor is like advice: it must be small to succeed.

But while it is relatively easy to make such little observations about the story-telling devices, it is nearly impossible about a film’s visuals because our understanding of the mechanisms of visual aesthetics remains less than rudimentary: it is non-existent. Visual artists have no good style books to consult. They have to work entirely on instinct because all aesthetic theories which we have till now evolved have proved to lead straight into the wilderness. Vital elements of the structure of visual material, like the thought processes of a lion, remain outside our brain’s ability to grasp.