I'm Not There by Todd Haynes. Rating:4 & 1/2 in 5

If you want me to tell you what this film, “I’m Not There” is all about, I can’t. Because the film itself ain’t straight. It is about what Bob Dylan had been, could have been, should have been, shouldn’t have been, and may have been. Towards the end of the film, Jude Quinn (played by Cate Blanchett), an incarnation of 60’s Dylan at the top of fame and controversy, says: “yes….chaos, clocks, watermelon…it’s everything”. That’s the closest one can get to describe this film in a sentence.

There are six incarnations of Bob Dylan in this film; two of them (depends on how you count), Jack Rollins/Pastor John (played by Christian Bale) and Jude Quinn, are biographically and behaviorally partially similar to Dylan; others are, at best, reflections and, at worst, refractions of his character [I am not using the words “best” and “worst” as value judgments here]. Among them is a black child who fraudulently calls himself Woody Guthrie (played by Marcus Carl Franklin) ---an act of homage by the director---; carries a guitar that says “This Machine Kills Fascists” [a tag the real Guthrie used to keep on his guitar], hitchhikes the length and breadth of American railroad, ends up meeting the real Guthrie in a hospital, and is a state fugitive (for unknown reasons) in reality. There is this perpetually bored-looking guy who faces an interrogation team (it seems) and calls himself Arthur Rimbaud (played by Ben Whishaw), who talks about anything and everything, and does it with dazzling smartness [“I accept chaos…..I am not sure it accepts me”]. Then there is Robbie Clark (played by Heath Ledger), a “James Dean, Marlon Brando, Jack Kerouac, all rolled into one”, who acts in the role of Jack Rollins in a Hollywood film “Grain of Sands” and becomes an instant hit, who is as erratic and as difficult in his marriage with his wife, a French painter, Claire (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg) as Bob Dylan the divorcee; the film goes through their love affair [“and the cat across the roof, mad in love, scream into drainpipes”] that stays as long as the Vietnam war, and at the end, Robbie, most probably, dies. The strangest of all incarnations of Dylan is played by Richard Gere, who really is Billy the Kid [ the only semblance of a reason given that explains why Billy the Kid can be Dylan’s incarnation is this dialog “we hadn’t spoken in a long while...I think he was involved with someone...actually...he said something to me on the phone about angels hanging out of buildings, which was frightening....I thought he was hallucinating...that's the last I heard....it was like what people say about Billy the kid...that he really just dodged the bullet and went on dying....and Jack, he always loved Billy the kid..], only older, who lives near a town called Riddle, where Giraffes and Unicorns roam across the American grassland; Billy faces his old arch-enemy, Pat Garrett (played by Bruce Greenwood), and defeats him, seemingly. Then there is Alice Fabian, played with deceptive effortlessness by Julianne Moore, who very clearly is Joan Baez, there is Allen Ginsberg, all the four Beatles, a model named Coco, harlequins, jokers, mimics, masked men, carnivalesque crowds, miners, passengers from tubes, paranoid reporters, hobos, Americans looking like period pieces, Lyndon Johnson proclaiming “ Its not yellow, its chicken”, etc etc. Do you get the picture? Of course you don’t. Like any good film, it cannot be expressed through words; it eludes literature. Major portions of the film is made like a mock-documentary; the part with Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett) is a honest and strong reference to Fellini’s 8 & ½ (in black & white); and there are freeze frames and captions accompanied by rapid gunshots, which is again a clear allusion of Jean Luc Godard’s “Masculin Feminin”. The storylines are shot in different film stocks and styles. The scenes featuring Woody Guthrie, Robbie Clark and Billy the Kid are in color. The scenes involving Jack Rollins/Pastor John are shot on 16mm color stock, and are framed as a documentary with interviews from people who knew him describing his transformation. Arthur Rimbaud's scenes are shot on very grainy black and white stock. Finally, there is an abundant array of wonderful Dylan songs (many of them sung by Dylan himself) that work like a harmonic twin to the visuals. Altogether, it is an unusual film. In fact, although this is a film from USA, this movie is the grandson of that past cinematic moment where Nouvelle Vague and Frederico Fellini met. This is a European film, mate, and of the highest quality. Do you ask anyone, “What is it all about, Godard’s “Pierrot Le Fou”? Do you ask, “Give me a synopsis of Fellini’s “Amarcord”? You will not dare, because you know that’s stupid and irreverent to the craft of film-making too. If you understand that part, you must not ask what this film is about. At the final judgment, this film is about films. You have to see it to know what it is all about. I am done with telling the story. Now I will tell you what I felt about the movie.

This movie has nailed Bob Dylan, precisely because it refuses to nail him down. The inanity of conventional Hollywood biopics like “Ali”, “Aviator”, lies in their futile attempt to create a private “human” out of celebrities; as a result, we see them crying, fucking, shitting in their pants, and ending up being the greatest hero of the humanity. No one dares to explain what we saw, what we heard, what we felt. This film does not try to portray humanity, it does not even pretend to believe that the phenomenon of Bob Dylan can be explained or even shown consistently through just one persona. That is the first hypothesis on which this film stands: “there he lies. God rest his soul.... and his rudeness. A devouring public can now share the remains of his sickness...and his phone numbers. There he lay--poet, prophet, outlaw, fake, star of electricity; nailed by peeping tom...who would soon discover (Cate Blanchett--the problem is like a naked person) even the ghost is more than one person...”. Even the ghost of Dylan is more than one person. The film-maker took a risky decision in opting for six different Dylans; it proved to be a brilliant one from a true experimental formalist. At the end, there is not a single mention of Bob Dylan in the film, but he is everywhere; you might try to pin him down scene by scene, but then, he is just not there. The film is about the real Dylan because it refuses to essentialize a singular Dylan, and forget about all his anomalies, contradictions, betrayals. The film gets him where he is not. Dylan is there where he is not. Find it paradoxical? That is the first clue to psycho-analysis. We can consider this film to be a psycho-analysis of Bob Dylan. A brilliant psycho-analysis at that.

With this film, director Todd Haynes has established himself as a true “Auteur”. This is the first film I have seen of him, and I am terribly impressed. He shows his inheritance of Fellini and Godard with a frank show of strength that astounds. Any director of lesser skill, imagination or confidence would have made a complete frothing mess out of it. Now, here I must caution you people. There are and will be negative reviews about this film that will say “It is incoherent, tangled”, “art-house stuff”, “lacks a coherent storyline”, “it is cerebral and obscure”, “it does not illuminate Bob Dylan” [Illuminate! What a JOKE!!], etc. They are all true. I prefer this film this way. I do not want to see a “coherent” Bob Dylan who notoriously was never so. If you want straight lines and coherence, don’t watch this movie. Do not watch those great films of 60’s from France and Italy. Do not read James Joyce, Virginia Woolf. Do not watch Picasso, do not watch Jackson Pollack. They are all incoherent, lack unified meaning, they are often deliberately obscure, they are all art-house. Then the greatness of art-forms is not for you.

I will give you a solution that make you understand the film better: whenever you find yourself plagued by the “incoherence” of the film, whenever you ask yourself “what does it mean?”, ask instead that famous counter-question asked by Dylan himself: How does it feel? How do you feel?

“I’m Not There” is not only a biopic of many Dylans, or Dylan as an idea, it is a film about his world, his influences, and his thoughts. It is a film about Dylan’s, and consequently Woody Guthrie’s, America. It is a film about the history of film-making. This film can be seen as an attempt to answer that unanswerable question Jean-Pierre Laud’s character asks in Godard’s “Masculin Feminin”: “Qui êtes-vous, Monsieur Bob Dylan?”. It can be taken as an attempt to relocate Fellini’s 8 & ½, or to reinvent it. It can be seen as a critique of those linear documentaries about Bob Dylan. It is something more as well, something I still haven’t discovered yet. May be I will when I watch it for the fourth time. I am afraid the students of Cinema Studies are going to be very busy writing dissertations on this one.

A film of such extraordinary intellectual complexity would have been dull without humor. Fortunately, the film retains the bitter, oblique humor of Dylan all the way through. Did you observe how many times I have a quoted a dialogue from the film? That is because I am in love with this film’s dialogs. They are sharp, moody, Dylan-ish, often very funny, and brilliant.

Yet, after all that, this film would not be standing on its feet today without such brilliant actors. I am particularly bowled out by Charlotte Gainsbourg as Claire. She is as perfect in the role of Claire as Vivian Leigh was as Blanche in “A Streetcar Named Desire”; she is a particularly strong-willed butterfly perpetually wounded. Christian Bale is spot on in his imitations of Dylan; there is a very thin line between imitating and monkey-ing someone, both Bale and Kate Blanchett manages to go deep into their characters even when imitating Dylan accent-by-accent, flinch-by-flinch. Late Heath Ledger, as always, went uncannily deep into his character. So deep in fact, it scares a little. And, of course, there is Cate Blanchett’s performance.

What Cate has done in this film is stuff of legend. Her acting in this movie has taken the craft of acting to a new level altogether. She is a neurotic, caustic, amphetamine-saturated character, a dazzling bundle of flinching nerves with an unpredictably ambivalent attitude towards everything. She takes a roll down the hill with the Beatles, cavorts with a model named Coco, and desperately tries to avoid a paranoid reporter from BBC. Cate follows Dylan so closely that some viewer might just sit back and mutter in discomfort, “Isn’t she crossing the line? Is she allowed to go that close? Is anyone allowed to go that close?” She unveils a pleading, feminine, insecure quality in Dylan’s rage that, I never suspected, was there, inherent in him. Cate Blanchett’s acting in this film should be equated with Orson Wells’ in “Citizen Kane”, Marlon Brando’s in “A Streetcar Named Desire”, or, in “Last Tango in Paris”.

The cinematography of Edward Lachman is cerebral, spot-on, and often dazzling. So is the editing.

Director Todd Haynes has won the Special Jury award at Venice for this film. He should have got the Golden Lion as well, which went to Ang Lee for his “Lust; Caution”.

I am not going to give this film a 5. That does not mean this is not a great film. I am deducting this ½ point as a gesture of optimism. I expect even better things to come from Todd Haynes. I am saving up my perfect 5 for that. Also, great films like this need a little time to gain their true stature. Just like good wine. So let’s say I am waiting for this film to decant a bit. I am not sure this is a perfect film; there is almost nothing to compare it with. May be five years from now, I will accept defeat and give it a 5. For now, I will remember it as an extraordinary film that proved to be a resounding slap over the cheeks of those ruddy little biopics Hollywood puke out in the market every year. I will remember it as 2007's best film.

BAIDURYA CHAKRABARTI