THE CENTURY PLAZA (Eric Lahey, 2005)

Where I live is very important to me . . . even if it’s a hole in the wall, it’s my hole in the wall.” — one of the residents of the Century Plaza

Eric Lahey, the production assistant on Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003) whose artwork was used, spent more than six months at the Century Plaza in downtown Portland, Oregon, in order to make this brilliant documentary. Once a hotel catering to traveling salesmen, it deteriorated into a complex of single room occupancies for transients, prostitutes, parolees and others trying desperately not to join the army of the homeless, up from whose ranks some have risen. (Such residencies for the poor are disappearing in the U.S.) Compassionate, nonjudgmental, unsentimental, Lahey is very much Van Sant’s disciple—and, incredibly, a mere 25 when this film, which he also photographed and edited, was released.
     Rico, an orange-and-white tabby, is the main character. Rico roams the hotel’s corridors and various rooms, both witness and spirit. Visually he projects a continuity amongst the members of the fragile, somewhat shifting community of residents. Rico also constantly implies the immense loneliness that he assuages, accounting for the residents’ openness to allowing him into their private domains.
     We hear about another cat. This belongs to Bob, one of the residents. Currently he is boarding this adored pet at an animal hospital. A convicted child molester, Bob is haunted by what he has done; he figures that the nine- and ten-year old boys he molested, who would be in their thirties now, are still traumatized by what he did to them. Bob is vigilant in his self-monitoring, to keep from acting on his urges. When at the end we are given a summary of resident outcomes, we learn that Bob was sent back to prison because he went off his medication, taking which was a condition of his parole. We wonder whether the cost of his cat’s treatment prohibited Bob from keeping current with his own medication. We recall Bob’s account of his criminal history. “I think that’s enough for today,” Bob tells Lahey, who is invisible throughout and who applies to the image of Bob a slow fadeout—tactful, respectful, deeply moving.
     Lahey shows us and interviews a host of the hotel’s residents, a tangle of raw-end lives. There are a dissolving young couple, Chastity and Manuel, and their young son, Devin. “My life,” says another resident, Greg, “[revolves] around Mormonism and drugs.” We learn at the end that went back to Salt Lake City, Utah, leaving his roommate, Mahesh, from India, homeless. A philosophical defeatist, the one resident we see reading books, contributes some of the film’s best lines: “Obviously there is something damaged that happened in my life to bring me to this”; “a long boredom broken by panic”—his definition of life. Another resident, Isaac, assaults and kills a cockroach with the sole of his shoe. This is how good Lahey is: We see the approach but only hear the whack; Lahey cuts to an hilarious shot of Rico tearing down a hallway.
     A loose railing from one of the floors to the next effortless symbolizes the state of these people’s lives as another accident waiting to happen.
     We see Rico roaming in the alleyway adjacent to the hotel as well. Indeed, Lahey musters poetic shots of the exterior of the hotel and Portland streets at night—poetic; not poetical. Like Van Sant, young Lahey is a soulful artist. His every shot, however, turns our minds toward the nearly lost souls who are the film’s reason for being.

SILENT LIGHT (Carlos Reygadas, 2007)

From Mexico, but in Plautdietsch, not Spanish, because it deals with Mennonites, Stellet licht is as mysterious as either cosmos or humanity. Its title refers to dawn, but also to cinema, and writer-director Carlos Reygadas draws upon Dreyer, Bergman (note the clock), Tarkovsky (note the wet), Tarr, others. Recalling Sokurov’s Spiritual Voices (1996), the opening shot is a long time-lapsed observance of dawn’s light replacing darkness at a farm outside Chihuahua. (Animal noises, both savage and domestic, abound.) Thus Reygadas introduces a central theme: transformations that seem like ruptures actually occur gradually, cumulatively. The film ends with a garish sunset passing into darkness.
     Esther (Miriam Toews, gut-wrenching) and Johan are a Mennonite couple with six children. Much of the film details the family at farm work and play. Johan is having an affair with Marianne; he has confided his infidelity to Esther but (with her knowledge) continues it. Marianne, torn between flesh and decency, ends the affair, telling Johan, “Peace is stronger than love”; but, believing Marianne is his soul-mate, Johan presses her back into the affair. How does all this affect Esther? She is mostly a “silent light”; her forbearance seems admirable, resolute. However, she confesses being shattered by the betrayal: “I have lost my place in the world.” Eventually a massive heart attack kills her and Johan finds his guilt and sorrow compounded. Marianne comes to the funeral service and kisses the corpse on the lips. Esther’s eyes open; Esther says, “Poor Johan.” Love is stronger than peace.
     Throughout, the camera enters or nearly enters dark spaces, such as the shed where we not-quite-see Marianne’s bare ass as Marianne and Johan have stand-up sex. At the funeral, through a window the figures indoors around Esther’s laid-out body, including Johan, are diaphanous reflections—ghosts.