Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/Down from the Mountain, Under the Sand

Movie Guru Rating:

Down From the Mountain
Enlightening (4 out of 5)

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Under the Sand
Meditative (3 out of 5)

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America Singing

Down From the Mountain makes a joyful noise

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

The soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou? has become this year's Buena Vista Social Club, a yuppie cause célèbre that seems to be in the CD changer of every SUV and cocktail party. And as with the Buena Vista disc, the attention is well-deserved, however much it might annoy purists. If you're only going to own one album of American Southern folk music, O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a fine overview. You can argue rightly that few of the new renditions of old material match the spirit of the original recordings. But at the same time, it's hard to gainsay the talent or taste of Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss, Gillian Welch and the other all-stars assembled for the project.

Down From the Mountain, a documentary of a concert last year at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium featuring all of the soundtrack's performers, goes the album one better. Almost all of the songs improve in the live setting with an enthusiastic audience, and it's fun to watch the exchanges of mutual admiration in the film's backstage moments.

The filmmakers are legend D.A. Pennebaker and his longtime cohorts Chris Hegedus and Nick Doob (Hegedus is also co-director of the Internet boom-and-bust documentary Startup.com). As usual, they let their cameras simply wander through the events, always seeming to be in the right place at the right time, whether it's Harris' dressing room as she plays a new composition for Welch or the hallway where the Cox Family is anxiously trying to track down patriarch Willard Cox moments before they're due to perform. But most of the action is on stage, and we get long, intimate takes of each of the performers (accompanied by warm, full audio tracks).

As we hear everyone from grizzled Virginian Ralph Stanley (who keeps sounding better the craggier he gets) to neo-folkie Welch talk about the music and their love of it, the movie becomes an understated document not just of one concert but of a whole continuum of American culture. In the intersection and cross-pollination of black and white gospel, English-Irish balladry and field holler blues, it finds intertwined roots that reach both backward and forward. As much as one of the performers protests that he "can't relate to" rock 'n' roll, you can't hear this music without hearing all of things that flowed from it. (One gripe: the all-purpose term "bluegrass" is used consistently throughout the film to refer to music that mostly predates bluegrass. This is American folk music, plain and simple.)

My guess is it's that sense of grounding that resonates so strongly in the O Brother soundtrack. Where Buena Vista Social Club allowed easy access to a foreign culture (and allowed us to hear echoes of our own), O Brother gives us a perspective on our own past, a reminder of shared history in what seems like a fractured, fractious society.

Even more than the somewhat muddled movie the soundtrack accompanied, in which the writing-producing Coen Brothers seemed torn between their reflexive snarky irony and a genuine love of the music, Down From the Mountain is an affectionate and unaffected celebration of the songs and the voices behind them. What songs they are: "Keep on the Sunny Side," "Angel Band," "Man of Constant Sorrow," "Po Lazarus." And what voices, too, from the crystalline harmonies of Krauss, Welch and Harris to the aching rasp of Stanley's a cappella "O Death." This movie sings, and it makes you want to join in.

Absence of Emotion

Charlotte Rampling works strange magic in Under the Sand

by Adrienne Martini

Of the colorful spectrum of human emotions, grief is probably among the least outwardly dramatic, second only to, possibly, a good round of monopolar depression. Once the initial shock of loss fades, what remains is like a vacuum of feeling, a void into which any real discernible emotion is sucked, like light into a black hole. As lovely as it is to experience, real grief is even lovelier on film. How does an actor portray affectless absence of more or less everything and still make it somehow both identifiable and compelling?

The answer most likely is not spelled out in any acting text but is definitely on the final. And Charlotte Rampling's performance in Fran�ois Ozon's Under the Sand should be required viewing. This quiet—both in terms of dialogue and tone—film is some of Rampling's best work, which is remarkable given how little outward drama there is for her to portray.

Marie (Rampling) and her husband Jean (Bruno Cremer) head to their vacation house, which is in some quaint village on the French coast. After a comfortable meal, which is full of the non-verbal hallmarks of living with the same human being for over 25 years, and a good night's sleep, the couple heads to the beach. Jean heads into the water while Marie naps. When she awakens, he is gone. Did he drown? Or did he just leave? She doesn't know, nor do we.

After a flurry of a search—helicopters are involved—Marie returns to her life. But there has been a change; both in the texture of the world (the film stock shifts from 35mm to Super 16), and in Rampling's face. She has gone from older woman settling in to the last third of her life to a nervous-yet-somehow-empty husk who is dealing with grief and uncertainty as best she can. It's fascinating and horrifying to watch.

Ozon and co-writers Emmanuéle Bernheim, Marina De Van, and Marcia Romano manipulate the story in such a way that the viewer never gets any more of a grasp on exactly what happened to Jean than Marie does. All we know is that he's gone and that the screenwriters are holding their plot-cards as close to their chests as the fates would, in the real life version of this same scenario.

Slowly, Marie starts to let Jean and their life go, even though he is still omnipresent in her thoughts and visually present in the film, and rebuild. But for each harrowing step forward, including a tryst with a friend of a friend (Vincent, played by the wiry Jacques Nolot), Marie still remains somehow absent and removed. Yet for all of her character's inaction, Rampling keeps her performance dynamic and vivid. You can't help but watch the gorgeous, highly skilled actor put all of the tools she earned over the years to brilliant use.

In the end, Under the Sand never quite pays off. All of the story's tension and the delicate balance between the suspenseful mystery of Jean's whereabouts and Marie's increasingly futile attempts to feel more than nothing collapses. But until that happens, it's a unexpectedly magnetic character study.