A while back, I watched a bunch of short films. Looking at lists of popular shorts (under 60 minutes), many recommended La Jetee, which was not readily available when I did the series. I found a copy at a nearby county library that lets outsiders borrow stuff and was able to watch this film that inspired a favorite film of mine...
La Jetee (1963) written and directed by Chris Marker
A young boy visits the Paris airport on a Sunday with his family, because it's fun to watch the planes. He sees a beautiful woman at the end of the observation deck. He also sees something he doesn't quite understand though the voiceover tells us it is the death of a man. Several days later, Paris is wiped out at the beginning of World War III. The surviving Parisians flee to underground tunnels where society morphs. Without resources to survive, some scientist find a way to send people into the past and the future, hoping to get food and energy needed for survival. The boy has grown by now and his strong attachment to the image of the airport woman makes him a good candidate to endure the displacement of being sent back in time. They hook him up to their equipment and he travels back, meeting the woman and building a relationship. With many successful trips, the scientists send him to the future to beg for help. His interactions bring the needed help and the future scientists want to help the man. He wants only one thing, to go back to the woman in the past. They grant that, sending him back to the airport. Another agent is sent back and kills the man after he gets to see the woman one last time. His death is the one witnessed by his younger self, a jarring parallel that ends the film.
The movie is striking in its style. The images are almost entirely still photos, with some panning and some fade-ins and -outs providing a small amount of activity. The story is told in voiceover by a narrator who is not a character in the story, just the omniscient filmmaker telling viewers what they need to know as the story proceeds. The only other voices are the scientists, who are heard whispering in German, as if they were mad scientists or Nazi horror mongers. My description might make it sound amateurish or cheap, but the style is beguiling and easily holds viewers' attention. Ken Burns achieves a similar effect in his documentaries like The Civil War, using still images with voiceovers to convey the narrative.
But Burns is not the one who stood on the shoulders of this work. The great innovation comes from Terry Gilliam, who used this short black and white film (27 minute run time) as inspiration for...
12 Monkeys (1995) directed by Terry Gilliam
James Cole (Bruce Willis) is haunted by dreams of his youth visiting an airport and seeing a man gunned down and a woman running after him. His waking life is also a nightmare. He lives in an underground, grubby prison because a virus killed five billion people in 1997, forcing the survivors to live underground until a vaccine can be developed. The scientists who are part of the society send prisoners (they call them "volunteers" but the prisoners are definitely "voluntold") into the past. They hope to discover the initial strain of the virus before it mutated so they can craft a vaccine, allowing humanity to return to the surface world. Cole is a good candidate because he is smart and resilient. He has gone out many times in a protective suit in their present time to collect animals (mostly bugs) so the scientists can study their immunity to the virus.
Unfortunately, the first time the scientists send him back, he winds up in 1990 (they were hoping to land him in 1996). Worse, he's had a fight with police and winds up in a mental hospital where he is cared for by Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe), a compassionate psychiatrist. But the mental ward is hardly any better than the future prison. One thing that might make it worse is the heavy use of drugs to pacify the patients, which makes it much harder for Cole to communicate rationally. Cole meets Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), a truly insane person who rants and raves about a lot of things and tries to help Cole escape. Cole attempts to explain his mission to Goines and to the psychiatrists but no one believes him, partly because it is outlandish and partly because Cole is impaired by his treatment. Cole winds up in solitary confinement but he vanishes into the future where the scientists plan to use him again, hoping to land him in the right time and location. He goes through a lot of cycles of time travel, changing his relationships with Goines and Railly in intriguing ways, and getting him closer to the group suspected of spreading the virus...the Army of the 12 Monkeys.
The script is so well written that the time travel element works seamlessly and helps to build on the themes of paranoia, despair, hope, and dealing with mental health crises. Cole tries to keep himself together mentally even though his situation is very perilous and complicated. His breakdown is very sympathetic. Pitt gives a great performance as the unstable Goines, with physical and verbal ticks that sell his madness without making him cartoonish.
A good deal of the plot from La Jetee is used but it is expanded upon in very interesting ways. Dealing with the mental health problems of time travel creates a lot of sympathy for the characters and makes dramatic problems more intense. Ironically, Railly gets enough evidence to convince her Cole is a time traveler just at the point when Cole gives in and assumes he is "mentally divergent" and hopes that his post-virus present is a figment of his imagination. Like the main character in the first film, all he really wants is to be with Railly. The ending is devastatingly tragic even as a coda shows a sign of hope for the future people.
The movie gets extra points from me for being a consistent time travel movie. Everything we see makes a coherent whole without resorting to alternate time lines or disappearing people/things/actions. Cole insists that he's not been sent back to save the world, just to gather information to help the scientists in the present find a cure. The movie sticks to that because it is more interested in Cole's personal drama than in pulling off some cool twist that doesn't withstand scrutiny. The whole package is so satisfying.
Highly recommended!
I hope you enjoyed this and let me know if you have any recommendations to fit this category. I am thinking about the two movie versions of The Fly and of The Thing as future posts.
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