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It’s true that numerous major figures in movies today seem unconcerned with narrative incident. In their own ways, Abbas Kiarostami, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Pedro Costa, Cristi Puiu, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul have employed narrative as a framework in order to capture other, ineffable things—like the physiques and behaviors of their performers or the atmospheres of particular settings. Yet it’s important to note, as Jonathan Rosenbaum did in his Reader essay on Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry, that such trailblazing directors arrived at their innovations by purposely subtracting attributes of filmmaking to which they’d grown accustomed. The problem with so many forgettable recent art movies is that try to re-create their innovations (or similar ones by equally important filmmakers) without making the effort to part with anything substantial.
This structure can be put to good use, as evidenced by the work of Argentinian director Lisandro Alonso. The key difference is that Alonso has a stronger sense of character than most of his contemporaries, rendering his mysterious subjects in exacting detail. This gives his films a hypnotic quality—if they’re working for you, you quickly stop caring whether their mysteries get resolved. When Alonso reveals some essential piece of background information in the final moments of Los Muertes and Liverpool, it’s not to explain the preceding drama but to add new inflections to it. Puiu’s Aurora is another beast entirely, slowly constructing a narrative logic so monolithic and opaque that the final explanatory scene (as deliberately underwhelming as the monologue that closes Psycho) feels like a cruel joke on our desire to understand it.
