A Muse

A Muse

Two years ago, a modest epic about young artists in Europe called “A Muse” was made and released last week. But it feels like something arrived from the late 20th century by time warp the days when movies were still a self-contained event that you left the house to see and then talked about over coffee or drinks at a bar later.

This is the kind of movie that made me want to write about and make movies when I was young, three decades ago; they are part of a lineage of European art cinema and English language films inspired by them that stretches from the ’60s through the ’90s and into our era. The writer-director-editor is Jimmy Bontatibus, a 24-year old American who has been making films in Europe for much of his young adulthood; he briefly attended Bela Tarr’s film school there.

That is why this movie plays like a bridge between continents and eras even if it wasn’t designed as such. Like Philip Kaufman’s adaptation of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” which it occasionally echoes, “A Muse” feels American and European at once. It features beautiful young creative Europeans talking about art and politics in relation to their lives while fretting over relationships that are enmeshed with their work.

“A Muse,” jumping around among different timelines in a non-linear, often impressionistic way, takes place mainly in Germany (Hamburg) and Romania (Bucharest and Cata, a small town), with side trips to Paris circa 1961 (via documentary footage of an artist whom one character fixates on). All the threads pass through Adrian (Rares Andrici of “Graduation”), a filmmaker artist who’s as manipulative and unknowable as he is cultured and handsome. Adrian is contrasted against two women more accurately, defined by them but they don’t complete him any more than he completes them.

In Hamburg 2018, Adrian mesmerizes Mia (Mersiha Husagic of Bontatibus’ debut feature “Life of Flowers”), a Bosnian born bisexual dancer who fears she’ll never measure up to the example set by her famous actress mother. He invites her to join his troupe of actor dancer artist types (several women and one man) who meet regularly to explore how art reflects and shapes life; they do this by making fake profiles on Tinder, bringing their dates to the same bar on the same night, then reporting back to the group on what happened and what they learned about themselves.

It’s like a reality show where the important action isn’t filmed. Eventually Mia and others in the group start to have misgivings about Adrian, whom they come to see as less a teacher or impresario than a cult leader especially when he interviews them on camera after their “dates,” in an icy Canadian-horror-movie lighting scheme that doesn’t suggest anything good will happen to anyone’s body.

In addition, this material is intercut with the 2015 Romanian timeline that sees Adrian dating another filmmaker, Bianca (Miriam Rizea of John Boorman’s “Queen and Country”). Bianca is making a documentary in which she invites people to imagine what their country could be like in the future, using Adrian as her cameraman and collaborator. The Adrian of this timeline can be enigmatic and difficult, but he doesn’t have the Heathcliff on the moors vibe of the Adrian Mia meets three years later.

Most of the 2015 timeline follows Bianca as she tries to figure out why Adrian won’t sleep with her and keeps disappearing for hours at a time; it turns out to be exactly what you’d expect. But this section of “A Muse” is less about a young man who can’t admit that he’s gay than it is about how artists use art to hide from themselves, prevent others from seeing who they really are and inflict their pain on everyone else.

This brings us or rather me back to French painter, performance artist, judo expert and Nouveaux Réalistes figurehead Yves Klein, whose work sets the stage for the third timeline: 1961 Paris. (That I have been personally obsessed with Klein since I was too young to even know who he was has absolutely nothing to do with my own excitement over his inclusion here).

In documentary footage included in “A Muse,” Klein states that he wanted to “liberate color from the prison of the line.” He is best known (or perhaps notorious) for a piece of performance art in which women covered their bodies in paint and used themselves as brushes while men in tuxedos watched. The Adrian we meet in 2018 has fashioned himself after Klein; take away one person from his group and he would have had a platonic harem of women, like Klein’s paint-smearers. As we move through time, we see how his obsession took root.

Klein is also responsible for IKB, or International Klein Blue, a unique shade of paint that was “bluer than blue.” Blue and gold Klein’s other favorite color are integrated into the production design of “A Muse,” most notably in a scene halfway through the film that has two characters discussing the symbolism and emotional impact of blue while lying on a bed as their bodies are bathed in blue light from a projector. There is another scene toward the end that I will not describe here because it is such a delightfully large final gesture, but it certainly puts that piece of color theory into action.

It is a great deal of information to take in, as you may have deduced. Bontatibus doesn’t make it simple for anyone. Like Edward Scissorhands sculpting a hedge, he cross-cuts, shifting forward and backward in time within the space of moments, blending documentary and news footage into a fictional narrative all the usual things that directors do when they’re making a gigantic international European-American co-production with 10 features under their belt instead of two. There are times when “A Muse” disappears up its own navel and you can barely tell what’s happening, much less what it’s about.

The editing during the first half often seems to be cutting constantly because it can or because that’s what some contemporary large-scale art cinema auteurs (including Christopher Nolan and Terrence Malick) like to do. Christopher Day’s spare but emotionally resonant score helps smooth out and unify sequences that might otherwise play as disjointed, and the cinematography, by Adrian Iurchevici and Roxana Reiss, infuses every interaction with a sort of enchanted documentary feeling, which prevents the most highfalutin conversations from falling into an abyss of self-importance.

In the second half “A Muse” settles into a more patient groove; if not quite hypnotic, then at least slightly sleep-inducing. Moments are allowed to play out at greater length; cuts are used to intensify meaning rather than just keep things confusing. But the whole thing is of a piece: The first half plants seeds that will bloom in the second; however one may feel about HOW information is communicated (and there’s plenty room for complaint on that front), one can hardly say it wasn’t provided.

The ending wouldn’t have nearly as much impact if the film hadn’t insisted on delivering crucial bits of information in its own idiosyncratic language and at its own speed; I’m sure its poker-faced sincerity would be laughed off the screen by cynics, but I don’t think cynics are this director’s target audience. This is a movie that seems at risk of spinning out of control at any moment.

But as problems go, that’s one every movie should have, isn’t it? If you never get up on the tightrope, you’ll never fall. What matters here is not mastery of theme or subject but mastery of voice. “A Muse” is aces in the second department; and given how much it’s trying to do and say dealing with ideas that more often run adjacent to each other than overlap it’s a triumph.

Devotees of art house cinema’s greatest hits will recognize key influences (Patrice Chereau, Cristian Mungiu, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Rainer Werner Fassbinder; strong Anna Karina vibes from Husagic suggest early works by Jean Luc Godard as well as Paul Thomas Anderson and Steven Soderbergh [Adrian could be a next-generation version of James Spader’s filmmaker-manipulator character in “sex, lies, and videotape”]). But the end result strikes notes that are unique; they feel arrived at through intuition and trial-and-error rather than by sticking to some film-reference playbook. What this filmmaker still has to learn can be picked up through experience. What he knows can’t be taught.

All three main actors are incredible. Husagic and Rizea play characters that are so true to life, they might as well be people you meet on the street in any big city; Andrici gives such warmth to a person who’s secretive and damaged though he lets us see why other people would love him even when they know they’re being used.

Toward the end of the movie we get a shot of Husagic close-up followed by one of Andrici close-up on some Hamburg street at night, that is what it feels like to fall in love. I love these characters for their honesty, their yearning, and how easily hurt they are intoxicated by art’s possibilities. The name could be given to all of them.

Watch A Muse For Free On Gomovies.