I took last year off from my city's annual True/False film festival. It was the first time I'd missed the festival in the seventeen years it's been in existence, but I have trust issues and co-morbidities that make me disinclined to stick my neck out into a global pandemic. You know how it goes, sometimes. I'm fully vaccinated this year and the festival is being militant about safety protocols, so I'm back this at it. The experience of being in crowds has changed. Crowds are now fraught and anxiety-inducing. Once I was in the auditorium, I was thankful that I could shrink the scope of my world to just me and what was on the screen.
The Balcony Movie (2021, directed by Pawel Lozinski) is what movie people call "high concept." The director's experiment is to place a camera (and a sound boom, which is often a character in the film) on a balcony on his house facing the street and the sidewalk and ask passers by questions about the meaning of life, whether that meaning is found in personal identity, relationships, national identity, what have you. You wouldn't think such a concept would yield a feature, yet here we are. The key is patience. Lozinski sat on his balcony for two years and captured thousands of interactions. Winnowing them down to the length of the current film must have been an arduous task, but he teased out some gems. The film is by turns funny, touching, and increasingly dark-hearted. An interlude late in the film sees crowds of young men marching in the street, presumably in response to an election of Poland's far-right ruling party. These people hate immigrants and LGBT+ people and that resentment has its mask off when Lozinski captures it. This is alarming coming after an interaction with a young lesbian earlier in the film, and an elderly gay man who had just lost his partner of forty years. Any of his interactions could have spun out to a different story, but he confines them in the frame he's established.
Chaining a camera to a single vantage point for 100 minutes carries with it the risk of visual monotony, but the film's philosophy believes that looking at people is more inherently interesting than aesthetics. In spite of this, the film benefits from the changing seasons and the shifting quality of light that comes with them, so style is not entirely absent. One of the film's persistent characters is the landlady who maintains the sidewalk and the lawn, mowing one season, raking leaves with a home-made broom in another, and shoveling snow in the next. She acts as a sort of Greek chorus. One of the other recurring characters is Robert, a homeless man just released from jail, whose bitterness brings him back into frame time and again in order to bemoan his life and air his grievances with the world. Even here, though, we see this man's life visibly improving even if it's not to his satisfaction. Another woman, who is only on camera once, seems like she's rushing off to commit suicide. In spite of these episodes and the social and political elements of Poland generally, this isn't a downer. Some of the people in the film are funny. Some are happy. An elderly couple never stop to talk to the camera, but they are twice seen hauling a wheeled suitcase each with a hand on the handle. These two are delightfully enigmatic because they keep their secrets. They let the audience themselves imprint any story they like upon them. The film cuts a broad swath.
As much as Lozinski keeps himself off camera, he is very much a character in the film and it is as much about the process of making the film itself as it is about its subjects. The camera is shown to be adjusting to light and to the scope of its surroundings in a way that calls attention to it as a piece of equipment, while the boom mike drifts in and out of the frame throughout the film. The nature of its making is always in front of the audience, undisguised. Lozinki has also included people from his own life: his wife (who is a producer) is sardonic when she's on camera, while his daughter is unruly and sarcastic in the way of daughters. The film elides their relationships without specifics in a way that invites the viewer to invent their own stories. It's one of those films that is sometimes a Rorschach test, in which the audience sees what's in their own minds in the images presented on screen.
2nd Chance (2022, directed by Ramin Bahrani) begins with a man shooting himself in the chest. This is Richard Davis, the inventor of concealable body armor and the founder of the titular company which manufactured bullet-proof vests first for the police, then for the military. This is a standard type of documentary, constructed mostly of archive footage and punctuated by talking heads interviews with many of the principal characters. As such, it's not a film that wants to challenge the form of non-fiction film-making. What this film puts in its place is a story that touches on politics, truth, redemption, and the morality of pointing a weapon at another human being. Davis himself is a colorful character who is both sympathetic and abhorrent depending on your point of view.
As the film progresses, Davis spins an origin story that may or may not be true. He relates how as a worker at a pizzeria when he was a young man he fought off three men in the alley behind his workplace, killing two of them and wounding a third. The experience instilled in him the need for the "good guys" (in Davis's mind, the police) to have some form of protection from gunfire. His company's founding is predicated on the good will and the business of police departments, and to this end, he produces copaganda films featuring his own products, issues a newsletter detailing the officers saved by his concealable vests, and places a premium on officers who take out "bad guys" with return fire. One of those officers is Aaron Westrick, who Davis brings on as his man Friday. After the attacks on September 11, 2001, 2nd Chance has the opportunity to supply the US military with vests. To take some of the cost out of them and maximize profits, the company begins using a fiber called Zylon rather than the more expensive Kevlar and its relatives. And Davis himself tests it, as he has tested vests throughout his career, by shooting himself in the chest while wearing it. He survives, so he assumes the vests are safe. He is wrong, and Westrick knows it. He becomes both whistleblower and mole, tasked with getting evidence of actual malice among his bosses at the company. Whether or not Davis knew the vests were getting people killed or not is ambiguous, or at the very least obscured by Davis's self-created mythology. What is clear is that he makes the decision to do nothing. It costs him his company.
This is at least partially a film about self-deception, and how it shapes ideology. Davis has a black and white worldview. There are good guys and bad guys. When it's expressed in his exploitation gun-porn movies, it's the enemy of art. When it's expressed as a desire to execute "bad guys" it becomes a cancer on the body politic. Davis is an affable man whose mythology of self is charismatic in the way of reactionary anti-heroes played by Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood. When the film exposes it as myth late in the movie, he reverts to a basic position of grievance, impervious to facts. Westrick does not share Davis's inflexibility. Davis would have killed the man who shot at him if he had been in Westrick's position. Westrick does not, and the movie shows the consequences of that non-action when it interviews the man who Westrick shoots in return. That man is now a college professor and a pastor, and when shown one of Davis's films depicting their shootout, his review is a single word: bullshit.
I'm not entirely sure that the filmmakers aren't mesmerized by Davis to a point that compromises their film. Davis is an entirely deplorable man, but that veneer of integrity, that willingness to put his money where his mouth is in the course of shooting himself hundreds of times is hard to shake. Image often overrides facts, which Davis well knows. The incident at the pizzeria early in his life? There is no evidence it ever happened, but Davis rides the story to success. At one point, the filmmakers ask him point blank if he has ever knowingly lied about himself or his business. He equivocates about the word "knowingly". The truth is fungible in his mind. He creates it himself by force of will, by force of personality. God forbid facts should contradict him. A receptive audience might go along with him, too. We've seen such a thing writ large on the national stage these last six years or so, after all. The lies are rooted deep. It's hard to uproot them when it feels good to believe them.
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