The Bed You Sleep In. - movie reviews

Christian Century, March 3, 1993 by James M. Wall

FOUR SIGNIFICANT FILMS here emerged from the more than 300 on display from early morning until midnight at the 43rd annual Berlin Film Festival. Two are by independent North American filmmakers, the third is autobiographical work by a woman director from the republic of Georgia, and the fourth is from a veteran French director who has a special skill for working with young teenagers.

Atom Egoyan and Jon Jost are the two North Americans, Egoyan from Canada, and Jost from various points in the U.S. (his father was an army officer who moved frequently). Both men deal with personal loss depicted in a precise location--Armenia for Egoyan, Oregon for Jost.

Jost's The Bed You Sleep In tests the patience of viewers, lingering on scenes with a minimalist style in such a way that you suspect you have been trapped in someone's living room watching color slides of "My Summer Trip to a Small Town in the Woods of Oregon." But, if the viewer is patient--and an unfortunate handful at the first screening were not, rushing out in quest of a picture with "action"--it soon becomes apparent that what Jost is doing with his split-screen still shots and slow pans involves an inward journey. At journey's end, we arrive at an artist's sense of moral outrage.

If someone tries to tell you what Jon Jost's new film is "about," you have my permission to throw that someone into the Yaquina River. I can say this much: the Yaquina is in Oregon, and one of the better fishing streams that feeds into it is Drift Creek. Many scenes in The Bed You Sleep In occur in and around Drift Creek. But this is not a film "about" fishing, or "about" a small town that is dying because the spotted owl is putting loggers out of business or because logging is destroying the environment.

Jost demands that you look at what happens to logs when they arrive at a sawmill. I was reminded of Night Mail, John Grierson's famous documentary of the 1930s, a celebrated portrait of modern transportation. But that memory was undercut by Erlig Wold's disturbing original musical score that evoked another kind of film: David Lynch's Blue Velvet, with its vision of evil lurking beneath the surface of another small lumber town. Jost wants you to realize slowly that not all is as it seems in this Oregon town. Unlike Lynch, however, he doesn't just tell you a story of evil, or show evil in action; he demands that you experience it yourself. He takes his camera to the front of houses where people are hurting, and then slips inside to wait quietly as those who suffer speak slowly about so much pain that you want to shout at the screen and say, Enough already.

Jost is angry at American society, and he focuses that anger on an absence of trust, public and personal. In the closing credits for The Bed You Sleep In, Jost underscores this vision with Ralph Waldo Emerson's assertion: "Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide inside the liar, but a stab at the health of human society." His is a bleak vision, but he is an artist angry at the absence of trust. The hope in his film is in the anger.

Canadian director Atom Egoyan is a quiet man who avoided a press conference after the initial screening of his sixth feature film, Calendar. A few of us caught up with him just outside the theater where he willingly chatted about his picture, which deals with a photographer, played by Egoyan, who like the director is from an Armenian family but doesn't speak the language. His wife plays the role of Egoyan's movie wife, but she does speak the language--which sets up the film's drama of failed communication and experiences not shared.

The couple travels to Armenia to take pictures of churches for a calendar. (The film is co-produced by the Armenian government, a German television company and Egoyan's Canadian company.) The film's premise is simple: a local guide drives the photographer and his wife to remote church sites and describes the significance of the architecture and history of the buildings. (In one delightful exchange he refers to a point of "energy" which determined the location of the structure.) The wife translates for her husband, but it soon becomes obvious that she is also developing a rapport with the guide; they share a love for the country and its churches, and they have a common language which the husband lacks. But more than the Armenian language is missing from this marriage. The husband is someone who observes but cannot participate. From the wife's first attempt to translate the deep feelings the guide has for country and church, it is clear that it is only a matter of time before their rapport will translate into love.

Egoyan tells his story of a disintegrating marriage on several levels, cutting from a subjective 8 mm segment, which he shoots as the wife and guide talk, back to the film's regular camera, which captures the increasing tension between husband and wife. The film also alternates between the period in Armenia before the marriage fails and a period in Canada a year later as Egoyan's character "conducts" a series of dates with women he seeks out because they speak different languages and because they will reject him after they finish a bottle of wine together. Tension is created by long sections in which only Armenian is spoken, which neither the photographer not the film's audience can understand. And always there is the countryside of Armenia, and the centuries-old churches, which stand as mute witnesses to the folly of a man who has removed himself from life by recording rather than experiencing what he sees.