Dreamscapes

 Not for nothing was Hollywood in its heyday known as the dream factory. In the movie houses of the period the curtains would open and a succession of gigantic images would emerge from the darkness. Then there would be music—and later sound—and audiences would be encompassed by the film-makers’ dream.

Soon movies included their characters’ dreams. Almost certainly this began with The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) where the main action that takes place in marvellously stylised sets turns out to be a dream by one of the protagonists. Later film audiences were being encouraged to recognise different levels of reality. In the 1940s when the great Shakespearean scholar S.L. Bethell needed to describe the Elizabethan audience’s multi-consciousness he naturally turned to slapstick comedy for an analogy. Bethell argued that the sequence in Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last where the comedian hangs precariously from a ledge is perceived as part of the plot but viewers also admire Lloyd the performer’s acrobatic skill. He is simultaneously performer and character. It is the same for the Astaire–Rogers musical numbers; we admire the innovativeness of the routine but also see them as expressing the characters’ emotions—never more so than in the famous “parting” number in Swing Time where Rogers and Astaire are virtuosos but also lovers, at least in the story. It became even more complex with the dream ballets in musicals such as An American in Paris—all free association and sometimes nightmare. Audiences of the period had no problems in adjusting to these different “realities”. Even the pure fantasy of Fred Astaire’s dance on the walls and ceiling in Royal Wedding (actually achieved with a slowly turning set) was accepted as being an expression of the character’s emotions.

Nightmares, real and imagined, were a staple of film noir. They were usually portrayed with distorted angles and the images often going in and out of focus. For Spellbound David O. Selznick and Alfred Hitchcock turned back the clock to The Cabinet of Dr Caligari by having the dream of Gregory Peck’s anguished amnesia patient designed by Salvador Dali and then interpreted in the film with great panache by the psychiatrist Dr Brulov (Michael Chekhov).

I mention all this because Christopher Nolan’s Inception seems to be drawing on all these elements for what he modestly sees as a science fiction/heist movie. Certainly Nolan has always been interested in experimenting with different kinds of film narrative as well as various forms of stylisation, especially in his two Batman movies Dark Knight and Batman Begins, but for me Inception is far more innovative than perhaps even its creators realise, and all the better for it.

According to Nolan Inception “deals with levels of reality, and perceptions of reality … It’s an action film set in a contemporary world, but with a slight science fiction bent to it.” In fact it does much more. To be sure, the multiple plots are based on the traditional heist format with the usual recruitment scenes and contrasting personalities. Naturally the leader has a back story, as does the target. The difference is that the “heists” are from the targets’ dreams. Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) infiltrates an individual’s mind and steals the information he finds there. Extractors and their targets sleep in close proximity, connected by a device that administers a sedative. They then share a dream world that includes their mental projections. Nolan has a great deal of fun here, as the viewers—not to mention the characters—have to detect who is in whose dream. A nice twist has the characters able to experience real pain in this dream world but when they die they awaken. All this is set up in some admirably lucid exposition scenes set inside and out of the character’s dreams.

Nolan used as few digital effects as possible in his filmic dreams, even building a set that could turn 350 degrees for an extended sequence in the elaborately constructed climax (shades of Fred Astaire’s dance on the walls). This was because dreams in fact look real and not, Nolan insists, like special effects in the movies. At this point the film seems like an interesting variation on a favourite genre. This changes when we get to the inception itself and Cobb is hired, not to steal something but to implant an idea. What looked like being an enjoyable action adventure now becomes almost an essay in metaphysics with the film virtually investigating its own “reality”.

None of this is the least bit pretentious. (One shudders to think what an arthouse director would have made of this material.) Certainly there are thoughtful meditations on grief and loss as well as a believable tragic love story beautifully played by DiCaprio and Marion Cotillard. There is even symbolism. Not for nothing is Ellen Page’s sidekick called Ariadne, namesake of the mythical Ariadne who helped Theseus escape the labyrinth of the Minotaur. But Nolan keeps a tight grip on the narrative so that even though there are dreams within dreams plus different time on the various levels of consciousness portrayed in the film, the viewers are rarely confused. (Reportedly trying to figure out the script, however, was a nightmare for the actors on a first reading—the cinematographer really is indispensable even at the early stages of movie-making.)

Nolan takes advantage of the differing relationships audiences have to some of the new cinematic forms. Even though action movies like the Batman series can be quite dark, the action is rarely perceived as totally realistic. Audiences respond to the frenetic movement as a spectacle but without the emotional involvement viewers experience with the violence in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo or the torture scenes in Female Agents. These, to quote my regular movie-going companion, are “too too true”. Nolan exploits this distance when Cobb’s heist gang does battle with a team of alpine soldiers. As they are identified as projections coming from their target’s imagination they can be shot down without any moral qualms—much as characters can be disposed of during script conferences. Among other things Inception is about film-making itself.

Even though the film is constructed like a mosaic, at its centre is a straightforward realistic narrative based on our usual willing suspension of disbelief. We know we are watching a film but choose to believe in the film-maker’s “reality” during the screening. As in all the best thrillers the viewer identifies not just with the emotional journey of Cobb, the main protagonist, but with the other characters. There are no stereotypical villains, only a quest for understanding. Nolan has assembled a splendid ensemble cast that as well as the stars include actors of the calibre of Michael Caine, Ken Watanabe and Cillian Murphy. Even better, the writer-director has given his actors enough material to flesh out their characters. This kind of depth of characterisation is almost unheard of in contemporary thrillers but Inception is far more than a thriller.

By a happy coincidence, just as I was completing my research on Inception a VHS of one of the lost masterpieces of British cinema arrived in the mail. Like the current film, The Spider and the Fly portrays some of the situations found in the heist movie even though it was made in 1949, a year before the genre was conceived in The Asphalt Jungle. Scripted by veteran screen writer Robert Westerby, the earlier film has its origins in E.W. Hornung’s Raffles novels and Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin adventures plus, I suspect, their film and stage versions. These were anything but the light-hearted romps of the film versions. As George Orwell was the first to point out in his groundbreaking essay “Raffles and Miss Blandish”, Raffles never renounces the code of the English gentleman and ultimately atones for his crimes when he is killed after exposing an enemy spy in the Boer War. In addition many of the stories are filled with self-recriminations, mainly coming from the cracksman’s sidekick Bunny.

Westerby and his director Robert Hamer take this material further for The Spider and the Fly. They borrow the relationship between the burglar and the Chief of the Paris Police from the Arsène Lupin stories, but the rest is a profounder reworking of the Raffles character. Gone is the cricket—it would have been absurd in a French setting even though it enabled Hornung to make some pointed social comments. Here the cracksman is Philippe Lodocq (Guy Rolfe) told by his adversary that he is “a gentleman, which you can’t help, and a thief, which you can”. Lodocq too is far more corrupt than Raffles; “lying to more women than [he] can remember”; hiding behind a woman’s skirts when his female accomplice is arrested “on a technicality” to pressure him to confess. As played by Rolfe the character remains likeable—a response that becomes even more complicated as we come to understand Maubert (Eric Portman) the police chief.

Once again there are no villains. We enjoy the duel of wits between hunter and hunted, and sympathise with both characters as we come to realise they are in fact each other’s best friend. The sequence when Lodocq and Maubert can become comrades and team up for a spy mission during the Great War is the most appealing in the film and makes the final tragedy even more powerful. Guy Rolfe, one of the lost stars of British cinema, strikes just the right balance between insolence, stoicism and melancholy, while Eric Portman in the more demanding role seems at first all controlled restraint, then as the narrative unfolds he allows us to glimpse the man’s divided soul and anguish. The characters’ rivalry over Nadia Gray’s Madeleine, who is first seen as Lodocq’s accomplice, then his alibi, is handled particularly well.

Although it was shot in England (with some expertly matched second unit photography of Paris streets) Edward Carrick’s designs and Geoffrey Unsworth’s photography give The Spider and the Fly the look of a French film of the 1930s or 1940s. Carrick never copies Alexandre Trauner’s work for Marcel Carné, even though the expertly staged café scene could have come straight from Le Jour se Lève. Rather he is content to suggest the mood of the Paris of 1913 to 1916—at least as portrayed in French movies. Robert Hamer directs in a beautifully judged austere style, with the emphasis on the dialogue and the characters. I counted only two pans in the entire film and only found them on a second viewing. The second viewing also brought home to me how well composed was each frame of The Spider and the Fly. Hamer clearly was an artist who took pride in concealing his art.

Are there any lessons Christopher Nolan could draw from this sixty-year-old film? Absolutely! At present Nolan’s is a cinema of excess: $160 million budget, another $100 million for advertising, big themes along with attempts to re-invent film language. Robert Hamer on the other hand was in the best sense a classicist—immaculate composition and staging; the emphasis on the characters and the narrative. The best kind of cinema, however, comes from a dialogue between the innovative and the classical. The great directors—Griffith, Renoir, Welles, Wyler, Ophuls—did both.

So the best we can hope for Christopher Nolan is that his next picture is a little one—a small classical work.