Please update your browser
Your current browser version is outdated. We recommend updating to the latest version for an improved and secure browsing experience.
Intimacy and Distance
Freedom and Release
All of James Gray's films feature several distinct and related formal features: sustained shots lasting far longer than a conventional film (often three or even four times the average length of contemporaneous shots), fluctuating pools of light and strong chiaroscuro, an emphasis on partially blocked or obstructed spaces, shots through door frames, and the complementary use of doorways to demarcate interior and exterior domains. Taken together, these create a unique combination of directness and remove that invites comparison with the films of Terence Davies.
As a result of long habituation, Gray's characters seem unusually comfortable within these spaces, finding release internally (as in Armageddon Time), through family ritual, or, occasionally, through dance. Leonard, the previously suicidal protagonist of Two Lovers is distinctive even within Gray's body of work. Like Fyodor Dostoevsky's Underground Man, he seems to have psychically merged with the constrained space he inhabits (the shadow of his mother looms as a loving but oppressive presence).
Leonard finds release in the dance scene to the left, and the concomitant promise of escape into a different, less specifically Jewish life. The scene invites comparison with other Gray dance sequences like the one from The Yards (2000) below, but also with the charmingly awkward dance of Marcello Mastroianni in Luchino Visconti's adaptation of Dostoevsky's "White Nights" (1848). Two Lovers is also an adaptation of the Dostoevsky story, but it has a very different ending.
The most visually striking and emblematic scene in the film is an elaborately choreographed long take on the roof, which also evokes Visconti, particularly his treatment of Milan Cathedral in Rocco and His Brothers (1960, below). With the Celtic crosses visible in the background and the sounds of birds and of the pier intermingled, Gray's shot is as geographically specific (to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn) as that in any neorealist film. There are three major sections to the shot, and the supple but constrained movements of the camera also act as a correlate for the protagonist's frame of mind.
All of these elements come together in the moving but ambiguous final sequence. Leonard seems to make the right decision for highly debatable reasons, accepting Sandra's offer to take care of him and ending up where he was supposed to be at the beginning by the most passive means possible. Is this the equivalent of the disillusioned idealism of "White Nights?"
The Art of Confession
Gray's sense of space is also informed by the approach of 1970s independent filmmakers such as Jerry Schatzberg and Francis Ford Coppola. As in films like Scarecrow (Schatzberg, 1973) and The Conversation (Coppola, 1974), characters are often shown speaking and acting far away from the camera, with grills in between (as in the clip from The Yards at left).
Like The Conversation, The Immigrant (2013) focuses equally on looking and being watched. In the most powerful scene of Coppola's film, the two approaches come together in the Confession booth (below).
Gray's Confession scene, sensitively filmed and accompanied by John Tavener's Funeral Canticle (1996), is more elaborate, and more concerned with observers. This is characteristic of his filmmaking and also reinforces the sense that Bruno and Ewa are bound together. Her intense religious conviction is evident throughout the film, which makes her desperate insistence that maybe she will be unable to change her situation all the more affecting.
Ironically, Bruno's decision to inappropriately pry on Ewa in a private space sets in motion a series of reciprocal exchanges that enables both characters to break free.
-
Terence Davies
