文 / Glenn Kenny
Translation / Stiles
Paul Schrader's 2017 First Reformed Church shows an extremely strong anger and determination, and in a way it looks like the final film. But the screenwriter and director is still alive and has no plans to retire, so what else can he do but continue to make movies? The film, titled The Card Teller, starred Oscar Isaac, with Tiffany Hades and Tye Sheridan playing two characters who had a major impact on the man's life. It is neither a hit film nor a restatement of goals or principles, although it has elements of both.
For Schrader, french director Robert Bresson was an inexhaustible source of inspiration. In his dissertation and important film text, The TranscendentAl style of the Image: Dreyer, Ozu, bresson, Bresson was one of three filmmakers and one that Schrader imitated almost obsessively. (Honestly, I don't think that's a bad thing.) Schrader refers to "The Card Teller" as his "a man sitting in a room" or "man at a table" film (*i.e., a film about male loners); and that man is derived from Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest—which features footage of priests writing diaries, enhanced by voiceover reading aloud. In Taxi Driver, Schrader made Travis Bicker a "diary writer" and assigned the same voiceover, while director Martin Scorsese followed Godard's –also heavily influenced by Bresson –with visual cues to support this voiceover.
William Tell, or Will Tell, the male protagonist of The Card Teller, hints at both the classic fable (*The Story of William Thiel Shooting the Apple) and the Achilles Heel of every poker player (the name he gave himself). He wrote his diary in a writing notebook in perfect cursive English, but he had to turn the motel room he lived in white—with white sheets on both the furniture and the bed—before he could start writing. As a touring poker player, Will is a disciplined man. He had a lot of gambling wisdom to teach: "Red and black roulette is the only wise bet." "He went on to say that because your chances of winning are almost 50%." You win, you take what you see. If you lose, just slap your ass and leave. ”
Why does Will play cards? It's to cheer yourself up. His bitter memories of his early years as torturers by the U.S. military in Abu Ghraib prison made him want to live any longer—he distinctly remembers that in prison, he provoked another prisoner and hoped that the man would kill him—but he survived anyway. He was looking for a reason to live.
He finds two: La Linda, his gambling financier with whom he falls in love; kirk ("Kirk with a C" (as described in the film), the son of a military veterinarian, and his father, Will's former colleague, who can't stand the guilt and eventually commits suicide. Kirk reveals to Will part of his plan for revenge: to kidnap the military contractor who trains torturers without staining his hands, and retaliates with tit-for-tat. The three characters form a strange trio, and the actors' performances are all wonderful. The energetic Hades uses her talent to play a rich man in a low profile, while Kirk, played by Sheridan, is sincerely attractive despite his murderous intentions.
Will takes Kirk on his way, hoping to win enough money to get Kirk out of debt and teach him enough life experience to persuade him to abandon his murderous plans. This is the same as Travis Bicker's self-appointed mission to save the teenage girl Iris (*the plot of the movie Taxi Driver). But Will mainly wanted to redeem himself. As he sat at the poker table, Robert Levon Been's melancholy, almost tear-jerking soundtrack sounded at the same time. RLB is the former lead singer of the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and his father, Michael Been, scored Schrader's 1994 lovable Psychedelic Life with the same exploratory song. (The film's male protagonist, William Dafoe, happens to play the military contractor Kirk was looking for in this film.) )
So this movie, of course, isn't just about poker. More precisely, it has nothing to do with poker. This was emphasized the moment Thiel decided to leave the table. Playing cards is Will's hobby, but he's dismissive of everything that's relevant to it. In order to reflect this, the film inserts a funny nickname joke at the beginning, and explicitly says "I hate celebrity gambling" through the mouth of the protagonist. In a sense, this "lack of interest" is an important difference between this film and schrader's other "man at a table" films. The American Dancer explores male prostitution to some extent; the drug trade and use in Psychedelic Life was a key factor in New York City's culture at the time. The environmental problems mentioned in first reform are even more serious today than they were four years ago.
In The CardRunner, Schrader has a sub-theme that he can throw away like a cloak, and when he does, the film turns to a semi-surreal realm that somewhat resembles the climax of First Reformed. But then it turned to Bresson's variant and can be seen as one of the best shots of his career
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