Coming:

Un texto de Neil Young
Traducción: Mar Rosso
Versión en español

I'm no particular fan of the movie - in fact, to be brutally (ahem) frank, I rather hate it - but for me The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) narrowly justifies its existence simply for the exquisite way Tim Curry (as Dr F. N. Furter) delivers the line "I see you shiver with antici-----pation!" It's a phrase that sums up what is for me one of the best things about cinema - one of the enduring joys of the medium, if you like: the knowledge that there is all manner of potentially great stuff lurking just around the next corner... or two. Or, indeed, three. That antici----pation line popped into my head most recently when I heard, a couple of weeks back, that the first trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2007) had been posted online. American producers talk of a phenomenon they call "want-see" - it's a self-explanatory and much sought-after quality which they hope will somehow magically attach itself to their film, and cause a stampede for the multiplexes on opening weekend. I don't experience overwhelming feelings of "want-see" very often, but There Will Be Blood is, for me, a rather special case. The reason: ever since I first saw Paul Thomas Anderson's previous picture Punch-Drunk Love (2002), I was convinced it was the best film I'd ever seen; very possibly the best film ever made. Can such a claim can ever be realistically made about any work of movie? No. Do I make it? Yes.

I'd been an admirer of Anderson's talent since Boogie Nights (1997) and Magnolia (1999), but Punch-Drunk Love was a quantum leap into whole new territory. I'd heard that Anderson had experienced some health issues and personal problems before, during and after the shoot, and wouldn't have been surprised if he never made another film - indeed, couldn't see how he could possibly top what he'd achieved with P-DL. But then it emerged that he'd directed more than a handful of scenes on Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion (2006), where the insurers demanded his presence on set as a 'back up' in case anything went amiss with the octogenarian maestro (a role filled by Stephen Frears on Gosford Park [2001].) Rather a nice 'interim' gig for a young film-maker, what? And then I heard about There Will Be Blood.

So it was with eagerness mixed with a certain degree of nervous tension that I followed the link to YouTube, where it very likely will remain for the foreseeable future. Just don't expect anything too spectacular: this is what's known in the trade as a 'teaser' rather than a full trailer. The style is elliptical, restrained, enigmatic, revealing little about the film itself, other than it's set in the past, in rural America, may perhaps have something of a dusty Days of Heaven (1978) vibe, deals with drilling for oil, and features Daniel Day-Lewis (surely the world's most famous ex-cobbler) and Paul Dano (from Little Miss Sunshine).

There's dialogue - or to be precise, what sounds like monologue: "Are you an angry man? Are you envious? Do you get envious?" The source of the low, rumbling voice isn't identified, but it sounds very much like Day-Lewis is essaying yet another "period American" accent after Last of the Mohicans (1992), The Age of Innocence (1993), The Crucible (1996) and Gangs of New York (2002)... and did you know, incidentally, that Bill the Butcher's speech-patterns in the latter movie were modelled on a wax-cylinder recording of a person believed to be none other than Walt Whitman?

I first heard of the project a while ago (could it be as long ago as a year?) when it was announced that Anderson was working on an adaptation of Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil!. In the book, the narrator/protagonist is apparently 'Bunny' Ross, left-leaning son of an oil tycoon; his best friend Paul Watkins is from a drastically more humble background. I'm not sure how this ties in with Anderson's film, in which Day-Lewis's character is - according to early reports - named 'Plainview'; and Dano's 'Eli Sunday'.

And, to be honest, I don't actually want to know - not yet, at any rate. There are times when I'll seek out information, reviews, production tidbits; I've even been known to purchase soundtrack LPs in advance (Collateral; Miami Vice) in order to get me in the 'mood'. But this isn't going to be one of those times. Instead, I'm going to enter a virtual purdah. I will avoid all mention of the film in all media; I will resist the temptation to seek out Upton Sinclair's novel (or rather, order it via Amazon). I'm happy to wait until I'm sitting in a darkened cinema, and the lights go down, and the title of the film appears on the screen. Only then will I truly believe that Anderson has made another film after Punch-Drunk Love.

The plan is for There Will Be Blood to world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, which kicks off on August the 29th of this year [1]. I'd love to be there for the first showing, though it would be logistically extremely tricky - and I've found much wisdom in something I believe Dario Argento once said, to the extent that it doesn't matter when you see a film, just so long as you see it at some stage.

Which reminds me - my second most eagerly-anticipated upcoming feature is by none other than Dario himself: Mother of Tears (La Terza Madre, 2007), which is scheduled to premiere at the 2nd Rome Film Festival in October, thus belatedly completing the "Three Mothers" trilogy which began with Suspiria (1977) - which for some time has been neck-and-neck with Tarkovsky's Mirror (1974) for my all-time cinematic silver-medal - and continued with Inferno (1981).

Argento's star has - let's be brutally honest - fallen somewhat in recent years (heck, recent decades), but if there's one project that might just rekindle his old fire, it's Mother of Tears - in which he's reunited not only with his daughter Asia Argento (in the wake of her Cannes-conquering trifecta of Boarding Gate [2007], Go Go Tales [2007] and An Old Mistress [2007]), but also ex-partner and former regular collaborator Daria Nicolodi plus old mucker (and Suspiria survivor) Udo Kier - with a score by ex-Goblin Claudio Simonetti and a script co-written by the dudes behind Tobe Hooper's way-better-than-it-could-have-been Toolbox Murders (2004).

How can it possibly fail? Well "very easily" is the sensible answer. But the thing about cinema is that hope really does spring eternal. The British horse-owning aristocracy used to say that a gentleman who had a yearling entered in the Derby could never contemplate suicide, simply because he had too much to look forward to. Likewise, anyone wondering if modern life is really worth the bloody hassle - and who is an admirer of John Carpenter - will be similarly sustained for just a while longer once they've heard that his first feature since Ghosts of Mars (2001) has gone into pre-production, with the suitably generic title Psychopath (2008). "Lured into the effort to stop a serial killer an ex-CIA operative begins to question his own sanity," according to that unbeatable source of speculation, semi-truth and downright misinformation that is the IMDb. Other imminent or semi-imminent highlights may or may not include: Paul Verhoeven's long-gestating Erast Fandorin epic The Winter Queen (2009); Michael Haneke's disaster-courting self-remake Funny Games (2007), Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut Synecdoche, New York (2007); Kaufman collaborator Spike Jonze's Where The Wild Things Are (2008); Paul Greengrass's The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) Michael Mann's The Few (2008); David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises (2007); Malick's Tree of Life (2008); David Jacobson's Roadside Picnic (2008). And that's just the English-language, mainstream-ish side of cinema - don't get me started on James Benning's imminent R R (2007).

In most cases, nobody has seen these films; in certain cases (Mann, Malick, Jacobson) there's no concrete guarantee they will be completed, released, shown. But as soon as the rumours start to leak out, casting speculation begins to swirl, the film, in a way, has already begun - if only in our fevered minds. If past history is any guide, I know that I'll dream about There Will Be Blood, very likely more than once - and if I was to be able to add up the minutes I'll spend pondering it in advance, the figure would very likely eclipse the actual film's running time by quite a considerable margin.

Pauline Kael has the right idea when she published a review in the New Yorker in March 1975 with the characteristically double-entendre headline Coming: "Nashville" - an extended paean to Altman's masterpiece ("Is there such a thing as an orgy for movie-lovers?" it begins) based on a special sneak-preview screening, and seemingly written to excite both envy and shivers of anticipation. Because all films exist in what we might call a "triple moment" - the 'past' (where we know of a film's existence but haven't yet seen it, and must rely on our imagination), the 'present' (those couple of hours in which we're actually watching the film), and the 'future' (in which we've seen it, and where it's become part of our memory). Looked at in this way, the 'present' section is fleeting and evanescent - in relative terms, over almost as soon as it's begun. But the anticipation is perhaps the most intense, enjoyable period of all. Experience may warn us to be braced for the worst - INLAND EMPIRE, anyone? - but it's wild, optimistic hope that keeps us going, dreaming... coming. And, oh yes, there will be blood.

Sunderland 1st July, 2007


Notes:

1. Paul Thomas Anderson's film won't premiere at Venice Film Festival. It will be screened for the first time at Toronto International Film Festival (September 6-15th) [Go back]

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