Long time, no see

WHEN SLOW PACE IS LESS COOL, MORE GLACIAL

I’ve been thinking lately about certain first principles of filmmaking. For instance: how does one justify duration? I don’t mean a movie’s total running time. I mean the length of an individual moment, the span of an unbroken shot: what’s an appropriate amount of time to linger on an image?

Slow Cinema, so far as that constitutes a style or mode, naturally favours long takes over short, and prefers inertia to momentum. But can a take not seem unreasonably long? Can a film not prove unduly inert? If speed and tempo are creative decisions, how slow is too slow?

Hello Destroyer is not an inordinately slow-moving film. It tells a cogent, conventionally dramatic story, and much of its action transpires in a straightforward manner.

But it is a film almost perversely inclined toward the plodding tenor of a form it’s unqualified to affect. Ponderous languors run on interminably. Dull interludes recur again and again, seemingly without reason. To what stately arthouse grandeur does this movie aspire? Nothing is gained by its fits of sluggishness, and nothing is aroused by its strained air of malaise except boredom.

Slow is not a shortcut to serious. Slow is merely a choice, and here it is unearned.

Tyson Burr (Jared Abrahamson), the hero of Hello Destroyer, is an “enforcer” on a minor-league hockey team in small-town British Columbia.

The film describes his fall from grace: Tyson checks a player into the boards, hospitalizes him and is summarily accused, condemned and abandoned by the very institution that inculcated his appetite for violence. It is a tragedy, in short, of the unknowingly exploited. This is a compelling story. But tranquility, not fury, is the prevailing mood set by the film, and the drama has neither the force nor the ardour to mount an argument.

A more generous viewer might call the result “contemplative.” I might call it indistinct and thin.

Tyson is jogging on a treadmill. This is an hour into the picture, after he’s been ejected cruelly from his billet, has been alienated from his former teammates and has in disgrace returned to his family home. Tyson jogs away from the camera; his reflection we can see in a window in the centre of the frame. The director, Kevan Funk, holds this unyielding long take for an entire minute. Why one minute? Why not 30 seconds? Why not 10? No information whatsoever is derived from this silent interval. The audience gleans nothing of import about Tyson, no further insight into his crisis or state of mind.

If this is naturalism as portraiture, the picture is hardly enriched. If it’s an inducement to empathy, tedium frustrates the effect.

Godard once spoke of the image as a creation born of “a reconciliation of two realities that are more or less far apart” — of the productive juxtaposition of two or more ideas that seem at once related and in opposition. “The power or virtue of the created image depends on the nature of these connections,” he said. “What is great is not the image but the emotion it provokes.”

The images created and lingered over in Hello Destroyer — those endless long takes of exercise and brooding, of changing-room idles and nights on the sofa looking glum – are possessed of little power because they suggest so little thought. That necessary interplay of ideas, the provocative reconciliation that keeps a true image interesting at any length, seems altogether absent.

What’s created is simply empty. And what’s slow just seems slow. ∂ ½