No, David, This is Not Real Life: On the Intrusion of Fantasy into �Realistic� Films (and on Whether any Film Can Truly be Called �realistic�), with an Emphasis on Mathieu Kassovitz�s La Haine and Jia Zhangke�s Still Life

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*This post gives away some plot details of La Haine.  They�re not so much �spoilers� as things that might be more pleasant to see for yourself first, without knowing they�re coming.*

There is no such thing as a realistic movie.  Even the most v�rit� of documentaries is unrealistic.  Because reality isn�t filmed.  Reality does not have composition, reality does not have mise-en-sc�ne.  Even your shitty home movies are �composed,� when you think about it.  There are things cut out of the shot and there are things in the shot and those things in the shot are arranged in one particular manner rather than any other.  And because you�re framing them�which is what you�re doing when you film them�their composition takes on meaning, even if it�s only the meaning of how they�re composed.

I�ve always been skeptical of �realistic� films, of films that possess�according to the clich�-ridden critics��gritty realism,� of neorealism, of socialist realism, of K-mart realism, in fact, of all realisms except surrealism (and etymologically, I think that means �over-realism,� sur- means over in French, just as the uberin ubermensch means over but comes to mean super when we render ubermenschinto superman; I say this having taken four semesters of college French and zero semesters of college German).  But as I was saying, I�ve always been skeptical of art that makes a point of its �realism,� because, as far as I�m concerned, life itself is already too realistic.  Hell, I live in reality, I don�t need it when engaging with a work of art. 

But there are plenty of works of �realistic� art that I enjoy.  On a number of occasions, I�ve plugged Pedro Costa�s �gritty� Fontainhas films, like In Vanda�s Room and Colossal Youth.  And these films are so realistic that they generally get labeled cin�ma v�rit�.  Perhaps my concern with realism is that it sometimes gets confused with artlessness and philistinism. When I hear realism, I think of the �realistic� tractor porn of Soviet socialist realism; of Maxim Gorky�s shitty peasant childhood; of Raymond Carver characters drinking beer and leering at their wives; of industrial workers on strike; of cameras zooming in on a retching figure to capture every fleck of vomit.  I think of people luxuriating in the depiction of squalor (socialist realism) or the indignity of day-to-day white trash existence (K-mart realism).

But realism doesn�t have to be like that.  In Vanda�s Room is scrupulously realistic, and even bleak, but that doesn�t stop it from being beautiful, from being deeply aesthetically satisfying.  No, I think my objection to realism is a reaction to the Maxim Gorkys of the world, who think that all art must needs be realistic and would leave no room for fantasy, whimsy, or play.  In the Gorky canon, there would be no room for Borges or Nabokov, for Fellini or Tarkovsky, or the paintings of the surrealists (so many of whom were communists themselves, ironically enough).  It�s this Gorky/K-mart realistic approach to art which sees the artist as a mere stenographer of reality, rather than a creator of new realities.  I was quite pleased to find in the novelist J. G. Ballard�s Paris Reviewinterview his repeated insistence on the distinction between a realistic writer and an �imaginative� writer, in which class he includes himself.  Now this is perhaps taking it to the opposite extreme.  After all, Tolstoy was generally a �realistic� writer, but one can hardly accuse him of being unimaginative.  No, what we must understand is that there is room for both, for both realism and fantasy, and that we need both of them.  If everybody wrote like Nabokov, we would grow sick of it, just as we�d grow sick of it if everybody wrote like Chekhov.  It�s the inflexible partisans of each camp, who say that it�s an either/or proposition, that we must have either one or the other, that are misguided.  We can and we must have both.

The late, great J. G. Ballard, who evidently had no patience for Maxim Gorky's bullshit. 
The painting is "The Violation" by the Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux.

Which brings me back to my original question, however, which is: can any work of art trulybe realistic?  And I find myself thinking of certain works of art which have called attention to that difficulty, and I would like to discuss two of them in this post: Mathieu Kassovitz�s La Haine(1995) and Jia Zhangke�s Still Life (2006), two very different films which nonetheless operate on the premise that what we�re seeing is a faithful representation of reality (English major fun fact: we call the artistic representation of reality mimesis; �the more you know.�)  Now, as I said earlier, films lose their �realism� by the very fact of being filmed, so let�s just take that as a given, and rather explore the ways in which these films call attention to this artifice by directly contradicting it with brief flourishes of whimsical fantasy.

Kassovitz�s La Haine (Hatred) is a blistering black-and-white depiction of simmering tensions that occasionally burst into full-fledged violence in one of Paris�s suburban ghettos (les banlieues; for some reason, I never had a French class that didn�t devote some attention to les banlieues, as if no in-class �cultural unit� would be complete without an acknowledgement of French poverty and racism).  The film follows three banlieue-dwelling friends, an African, an Arab, and a Jew (played by Hubert Kound�, Sa�d Taghmaoui, and Vincent Cassel, respectively) over the course of one day and night as they have a series of misadventures, each of which brings them closer to the brink of disaster.  The film is peppered with images of the rage of the ghetto�s denizens and of the violence between them and the police; some of these images are taken from actual news footage, which gives the film a cin�ma v�rit� feel. 

So this is a very realistic film, and this realism is brought into even sharper relief when we consider the two elements of whimsicality that punctuate the film.  First, there�s the cow.  Vincent Cassel�s character, Vinz (and God, this is Vincent Cassel at his ugliest, which is saying something) claims that while he was participating in a riot the previous night, he saw a cow walking down the street, in the midst of the violence and chaos, and without explanation.  His friends don�t believe him of course (�You and your fucking cow�) but they briefly encounter the cow again.  I don�t recall the exact context, but Vinz and his friend Sa�d (Sa�d Taghmaoui) are together and suddenly Vinz sees the cow in clear daylight.  And he tries to get Sa�d to look at it, but Sa�d thinks Vinz is bullshitting and he�s occupied with something else anyway.  So Vinz gets a clear look at the cow, and then it disappears by the time he finally gets Sa�d to look.  This is surrealism in the tradition of Bu�uel, whose cinematic dinner parties had a tendency to be overrun by barnyard animals.

The cow.

There�s a later scene in the movie that�s quite beautiful.  Hubert (Hubert Kound�) and Sa�d have just been beaten by cops (Vinz had discreetly fled the scene and meets up with them after they�ve been released) and they�re on the roof of a building in the middle of night, basically killing time and engaging in philosophizing.  And we get a beautiful night view of Paris, with the Eiffel Tower prominently featured, and Sa�d says, �Hey, watch me turn off the Eiffel Tower.� And he snaps his fingers several times and nothing happens, and one of them says, �That only works in movies.� And they decide to leave the roof, but once they�re gone, the Eiffel Tower does in fact �turn off.�

What I like about these scenes is that they take any pretension to �socialist� realism and throw it out the window.  Even in the most �realistic� of films, there is still room for fantasy.  We find a similar effect achieved in Jia Zhangke�s 2006 masterpiece Still Life, which follows two people (one of them Jia�s regular actress and now wife Zhao Tao) as they meander around the Three Gorges Dam site, exploring villages in the process of being dismantled, searching for loved ones from whom they�ve been separated.  In one scene, Zhao Tao is at a fairly elegant dinner party being held by the some of the directors of the dam project, and they�re out on a patio overlooking the dam site, and there�s a new, �futuristic� looking building in the background, and without attracting much notice from the party-goers, it abruptly �fires its rockets� and �takes off� like a spaceship. 

The spaceship, "blasting off."

This is the only such scene in the film and it does not receive any commentary from the characters. Before and after the rocket ship launch, we have a faithfully realistic film. But all of that realism is joyfully undermined by this one scene of inexplicable whimsy.

Having said these things, I still don�t know that any film can truly be called �realistic,� but it�s good to see cases where the films that might think themselves realistic can come out and say, �Nope, don�t worry, we know we�re films, and here�s some magic to prove it.�