The Writing Was on the Wall in the ‘60s

Anyone old enough to contemplate Botox may have experienced an eerie sense of deja vu at the movies lately. Many recent films--including “Memento,” “Mulholland Drive,” “Donnie Darko,” “Vanilla Sky,” “Iris” and “Last Orders”--stir echoes of movies of the 1960s, an era of groundbreaking experimentation on and off the screen.

Back then, this experimental wave, which started in Europe and eventually overtook Hollywood as well, reflected a desire to discard stale modes of storytelling and forge a new cinematic language. Perhaps the same impulse is blossoming today. Adventurous moviemakers are tired of being asked to recycle the same ancient formulas. They’re desperate to break the mold, and they’re looking for inspiration to an era when nonlinear storytelling and bold subject matter seized the limelight.

Even if their movies fall short of the masterpieces they’re mimicking, it’s heartening that directors have rediscovered the giants of international cinema from the ‘60s: Ingmar Bergman, Alain Resnais, Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni. Those European directors first made their influence felt 35 or 40 years ago, when their innovative techniques were adopted by directors of American pictures like “The Pawnbroker,” “Point Blank,” “Two for the Road,” “Petulia,” “Midnight Cowboy” and “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”

Taking their lead from “Hiroshima Mon Amour” and “8 1/2,” enterprising directors fractured time and conjured dreamlike imagery. Not all of these Hollywood pictures were huge box-office successes, but they opened our eyes to new cinematic possibilities. The American New Wave probably culminated with “The Godfather Part II,” when Francis Ford Coppola intercut two stories that commented on each other obliquely rather than literally.

“Jaws” and “Star Wars” put an end to that adventurous brand of storytelling. Blinded by the colossal grosses of those, executives decided to bring back straight-ahead linear storytelling and banish more experimental impulses. I remember one studio chief telling me in the ‘70s, “I hate flashbacks,” and his literal-minded mantra gave a hint of the simplistic mode of moviemaking that would prevail for the next two decades. In order to tap the largest possible audience, Hollywood demanded clarity and obviousness instead of the elliptical style favored in the ‘60s.

Over the years, however, talented filmmakers began to chafe at these restrictions. Steven Soderbergh played a key role in helping to revive the techniques of ‘60s and ‘70s movies. He published a book of interviews with Richard Lester, a quintessential ‘60s director, and Soderbergh’s 1999 movie, “The Limey,” showed the influence of Lester’s “Petulia” as well as John Boorman’s “Point Blank.” In “Out of Sight,” Soderbergh imitated the famous time-tripping love scene from Nicolas Roeg’s “Don’t Look Now.” And Soderbergh’s low-budget “Schizopolis” felt like one of the underground movies hatched in the ‘60s. When he came to make “Traffic,” Soderbergh incorporated everything he had learned from ‘60s movies into a masterful triptych that daringly intercut three stories filmed in completely different styles.

Now the nonlinear techniques that startled audiences in the ‘60s are all the rage again. Even the relatively conventional “A Beautiful Mind” takes a page from the movies of the ‘60s by blurring the line between real events in John Forbes Nash Jr.’s life and hallucinations that exist only in his imagination.

A more complex structure operates in “Iris,” which is about novelist Iris Murdoch falling victim to Alzheimer’s disease. As her husband laments the disparity between the intellectual vitality she had in her youth and her helplessness as the disease ravages her, the film sagely cuts back and forth among the different times in her life. This same technique is far less artfully employed in “Pinero,” a kaleidoscopic look at the life of playwright Miguel Pinero. The film careens through his short, feverish life, apparently in an attempt to capture the chaotic mind of a stoned artist. But there’s something so arbitrary about the transitions that the whirling dervish of a movie sheds very little light on its troubled protagonist.

Fred Schepisi’s “Last Orders,” which follows four men on a journey to scatter the ashes of a recently deceased friend, is not much more illuminating. As the survivors travel to the sea, the film intercuts a jumble of memories from their lives over the past 50 years. Schepisi is a talented director, so the film is fluently made, and it benefits from the efforts of a superb cast that includes Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins, Helen Mirren, Tom Courtenay and David Hemmings. But it’s a surprisingly shallow movie. The elaborate skein of flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks reveals very little about the inner lives of the characters. “Last Orders” doesn’t match the depth of a 1968 movie on a very similar theme, Sidney Lumet’s “Bye Bye Braverman,” which focused on four middle-aged friends driving to the funeral of a fifth pal and reminiscing about the disappointments of their lives. And the time traveling in “Last Orders” never approaches the pungency of the 1967 classic “Two for the Road,” which scrambled several periods in the life of a married couple to highlight the cruel games that time plays on unsuspecting lovers.

One problem with today’s ‘60s-influenced movies is that they are experimental in an almost academic way. Their technical trickery doesn’t always seem organic or truly revolutionary; it can seem almost as mechanical as Gus Van Sant’s misguided shot-for-shot remake of “Psycho.”

Consider “Vanilla Sky,” the most excruciating example of this new nostalgia boom. The film is a remake of a 1998 Spanish film, Alejandro Amenabar’s “Open Your Eyes,” which was itself inspired by ‘60s movies like “Blowup” and “Last Year at Marienbad.” So “Vanilla Sky” starts out at several removes from any truly original filmmaking impulse. Director Cameron Crowe jumbles time, plays games with reality and illusion, and then takes a leap into metaphysical mysticism. But Crowe (best known for comic, naturalistic films like “Say Anything” and “Jerry Maguire”) has no aptitude for the fancy visionary style he’s aping. “Vanilla Sky” has none of the tension that directors like Resnais, Antonioni and Roeg brought to similar puzzle movies in the ‘60s. Instead of a chic, tantalizing enigma, Crowe has concocted a leaden lump of pretension.

Unlike Crowe, David Lynch is a director with a genuine flair for surrealism, and in “Mulholland Drive” he tips his hat to “Marienbad” and also borrows from Bergman’s 1967 masterpiece, “Persona,” another tale of female bonding, confused identity and dreamlike disorientation. Lynch knows how to create a creepy mood, and “Mulholland Drive” is often mesmerizing, but it seems like more of a divertissement than a profound exploration of psychosexual dynamics. Whereas Bergman plumbed the anguish of his two female protagonists--a mute actress (Liv Ullmann) and her unstable nurse (Bibi Andersson)--Lynch stays on the surface, tickling us with his sleight of hand but rarely evoking intense emotion. His movie is like Bergman Lite, and while it’s often fun to watch, it fails to get under your skin and arouse truly unsettling nightmares.

Of all the recent movies to experiment with nonlinear storytelling, “Memento” was the only one to take the kinds of risks that made “8 1/2” or “Two for the Road” so exhilarating. Writer-director Christopher Nolan unraveled a mystery through overlapping flashbacks that kept pushing backward in time. Unfortunately, “Memento” sank into incoherence at the conclusion. But at least it tried something novel, and so it was truer to the radical spirit of the ‘60s than many of these other clones.

Along with their experiments in nonlinear narrative, movies of the ‘60s were known for their sexual audacity. This trend also started in foreign films and then gradually reached American cinema. The late ‘60s and early ‘70s represented the peak (or nadir, depending on your point of view) of Hollywood’s sexual revolution. During the last decade, sex has become less and less visible in American films, aside from the puerile lasciviousness of teen comedies.

Foreign filmmakers, on the other hand, have once again embarked on a wave of sexual explicitness. Raw, graphic images pervade French films like “Romance,” “Fat Girl” and “Life of Jesus,” though I find these films more reminiscent of minor curiosities from the ‘60s like “I, a Woman” and “I Am Curious--Yellow,” than of the probing erotic dramas made by Bergman and Antonioni.

But at least foreign filmmakers are pushing the sexual envelope. In “Y Tu Mama Tambien,” Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron brings an arresting frankness and impudence to the tale of two teenage boys on a carnal road trip with an older woman. The movie is a cross between a ‘60s classic, Francois Truffaut’s “Jules and Jim,” and a later, more incendiary French movie, Bertrand Blier’s “Going Places.” “Y Tu Mama Tambien” has broken box office records in Mexico and has made nearly $2 million in U.S. theaters in less than a month.

Just as foreign films of the ‘60s gradually liberated Hollywood, I suspect that today’s sexy foreign movies will inspire some cheeky American auteurs to follow their example. One of the dominant motifs at this year’s Sundance Film Festival was sexual candor. You could see flickerings of a new eroticism in the grand jury prize-winner, “Personal Velocity,” a triptych of women’s stories marked by uninhibited sexuality; in the crowd-pleasing “Tadpole,” a saucier version of “The Graduate,” in which a 15-year-old boy is seduced by a lecherous older woman; and in “Secretary,” the tale of a sadomasochistic affair between a secretary and her boss.

The evidence is mounting that many of our most promising filmmakers long to rebel against the blandness of recent studio pictures. Although they haven’t yet found an authentic voice of their own, the impulse to experiment is invigorating, just as it was in the ‘60s. Now it’s time to turn away from past glories and invent a genuinely new wave befitting a new millennium.

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Stephen Farber is a movie critic for Movieline magazine and a regular contributor to Calendar.