PETER CALDER talks to filmmaker Ian Sachs about his foray into a world of suspense and plot twists in his festival flick, Married Life
KEY POINTS:
You don't have to meet Ira Sachs to know the man is a film geek. You can see it in every frame of his third feature, Married Life, which opens today in Auckland.
Sachs was in town last week to introduce the festival screenings of the film, a romantic melodrama about an adulterous man who decides to kill his wife to spare her the pain of discovering she has been betrayed. It's a bracing mix of noir, screwball comedy, Hitchcock thriller and wistful love story. Sachs makes no apology for that.
"Yes, it's all those things," he says, "and all those things are part of my imagination so I don't separate them. It's a genre film in a way, but I am not a genre filmmaker. Yes, I guess I am a film geek; I learnt about film by watching film and I never went to film school. But a film isn't worth its salt if you have to know a lot about film to enjoy it."
Sachs' previous two features played the festivals here, in 1996 and 2005, but neither had a commercial release. The first, The Delta, was a quasi-documentary and partly autobiographical film set in the American South, which Sachs calls "Ken Loach with a bit of Cassavetes", about a middle-class white boy's passion for the slightly older son of a Vietnamese woman and a black American soldier. The second, Forty Shades of Blue, featured an incandescent performance by Rip Torn as a womanising Memphis record producer with a Russian immigrant wife (Torn's character was based on Sachs' father, the director says).
But Married Life came from a more arcane source: an out-of-print 50s pulp-fiction novel, Five Roundabouts to Heaven, by John Bingham, whom John Le Carre cites as a mentor.
"I was driven by the story," Sachs says. "I've always been a fan of Patricia Highsmith because her books are a cross between soap operas and mysteries, stories in which something is wrong. All movies in a way ask the question: 'What is wrong here? What might happen?'. Even if you are doing a more aesthetic or existential film, you are always trying to create a sense where the audience is wondering what's going to happen. This film takes it even further because it is a suspense film. It takes the audience to the point of being scared."
It's not easy to discuss Married Life without spoiling crucial plot surprises but it is safe to say that the main character, a Manhattan businessman (Chris Cooper) rather badly misreads his wife, proves himself a less-than-competent murderer and ends up in a situation that neither he nor the audience could possibly have imagined.
Sachs smiles at the suggestion that the finale, which fairly drips with unexpected ironies, constitutes an essentially cynical view of human relationships. "Life as it stands is as good as it gets," the film seems to say, "and we dare not hope for more."
"The recognition that we don't know the person across the table from us or across the bed from us is wisdom, it's not pessimism," he says. "Harry starts out as the character who knows least about those around him and ends up with some sort of acceptance of the flaws and failures of the people that he loves and becomes a more genuine individual as a result.
"I wanted to make a film that gave people comfort in the isolation they often experience when they are in relationships. What I find is that the movie touches on anxieties people have and makes them a little nervous. I understand that: it's a movie about lies and secrets. It's what Hitchcock does, really. There's a social anxiety about his films that makes them crackle."
Born in 1965, Sachs has made a film set very firmly in 1949, but he says he is not fascinated by that period.
"I was interested in this story," he says. "It was set in that time but it's a very contemporary film. In the same way that Chinatown is not a film of the 30s, when it was set, but of the 70s when it was made, I think this is a film of now."
He admits the melange of styles makes it hard to market the film, which took barely US$1.5 million ($2 million) against a US$15 million budget in its US release. "Nowadays we expect the marketing to be contained within the movie, more than [it was] 30 years ago when there was a willingness to move in different directions."
