Sixty years ago, David Lean ventured into the vast sandstone mountains of Wadi Rum to photograph the world’s most interesting canvas: the human face. This credo is similar to that of A. Rambo, the latest low-budget feature from American indie mastermind Patrick Wang (The Bread Factory), shot in Winnipeg. The film includes a bareback three-hour biopic of French poet Arthur Rimbaud that plays like a black-box Lawrence of Arabia. It’s wonderful and attractive.
One’s Peter O’Toole is a young man named Blake Draper, whom you’ve probably never heard of, but who has been giving great performances over the decades. But directors Alec Guinness and Omar Sharif are instrumental, and “A. Rimbaud” is also a deeply esoteric one-man show, rendered in impossibly cinematic tones, and given a suitably original twist (a multi-month endeavor that plays only once a week at New York’s Roxy Cinema).
Just a few minutes into the massive runtime, Draper’s Rimbaud adjusts the camera to make himself appear smaller in order to recall a childhood story. This is almost the only time the fourth wall has been broken so brazenly, and it speaks to Wan’s postmodern approach to the screen (particularly the anti-Lean faction who believed that props should be invisible) and the way that “A. Rimbaud” embodies the spontaneous mischief of French surrealist work.
Set in the late 19th century, the film depicts Rambo’s formative years through one-sided dialogue, but even though the dialogue accommodates invisible reactions (like Han Solo’s reactions to Chewbacca), there are limits to how much he can overcome this self-imposed restraint. Still, this movie is completely mesmerizing to watch. That’s in no small part because Draper balances theatrical expressiveness with the nuances of a movie camera. He has an ambitious glint in his eye that makes the sparsely minimalist set feel fully alive. But as Rimbaud goes from an adventurous young man in London and Paris to an advanced colonial envoy in Algeria decades later, this feeling gradually fades, and Draper’s performance turns inward and becomes deeply reflective.
Although most of the dialogue is semi-silent, important characters in Rimbaud’s life are embodied by musical instruments, from an intimidating tuba to melodic string instruments, depending on who is speaking and their place in the story. However, the shape each of them is conjured up, like the adults around Charlie Brown, is completely different. It’s odd that it’s ostensibly at odds with director Wan’s bare-bones approach, born of economic necessity – it’s much cheaper to shoot in an enclosed room with a stage flat than to hire thousands of extras – but this formal ingenuity turns out to be appropriate and ultimately necessary to tell this particular story. Wang explores Rimbaud as a deeply lonely figure, ensuring that the isolation of this stage-like setting becomes a clear formal boundary.
There are always people near Rimbaud (chairs move independently of him, objects pass in front of him by his magic tricks), but he is rarely able to fully connect with them. But the flip side of this coin is that Wan and cinematographer Frank Barrera tie us so closely to Rimbaud that we have no choice but to empathize with this brash originality. Yet, in his constant desire to escape and explore, he always seems to leave behind his loved ones and expose himself to inevitable regret.
Draper speaks with a pronounced English accent (with the exception of French words and names), bringing a suitably poetic feel to the verbose dialogue and ensuring that the words written by Wang hardly feel different from those written by Rimbaud himself. Many of his poems are long-winded, essentially turning “A. Rimbaud” into a bizarre version of a modern-day music biopic about a pop star under estate management. Half the reason to buy a ticket is to see Earworm’s hits recreated from scratch.
But even with the Rimbaud faithful in the crowd, Wang never seems to be satisfied with mechanical presentation, distorting the limits of his form with his grand imagination. Some of the poet’s most hallucinatory images seep from the corners of the screen. In poems like “The Drunken Ship,” the words themselves are as important as Rimbaud’s impassioned delivery, with the camera fixated on Draper’s impassioned delivery while evoking sounds and even natural elements from outside the frame. Few filmmakers have such an understanding that poetry is as much a performance as it is a writing.
Other works, like “Vowels,” adapt Rimbaud’s synaesthetic framework to the texture of the film itself, viewing it as a medium that can freely rotate around its visual axis if the director chooses. In fact, A. Rimbaud begins as the kind of movie that Rimbaud himself would have made had technology been invented. Wang can even blend boundaries between other visual mediums by turning motion blur into painterly brushstrokes. It’s really fun to watch.
Admittedly, the film is nearly three hours long and is also incredibly demanding. The first half in particular is, by its very nature, a repetitive cycle of directionless youth that Rambo struggles to break. Intentionally or not, it’s difficult to pull off, but it also has side effects. During Rimbaud’s journey as an adult (when he also learns to speak fluent Arabic), the film pulls a surprising switch as it slows down and becomes more tonally and formally serious. The film not only gradually accustoms the viewer to its aural specificity, completely familiarizing itself with the dialogue, which appears as music and silence, but also makes a clear turn towards a more traditional, more classical visual presentation, which should not be possible in a film like this. This is achieved through Draper’s close-ups, which are so unflinching, so tactile, so thoughtfully layered by Barrera’s conscientious lighting and warm, visceral 35mm photography that they cannot be deciphered from traditional studio photographic close-ups. Needless to say, it is as effective as if Wang had found a secret path to the soul.
“Any language can be yours,” Rimbaud once advised his sister, referring to the rigorous study that made him a multilingual and sought-after diplomat. But this message feels like it was initiated by Mr. Wan himself, as if he were writing a cinematic manifesto about the extraordinary exercise of cinematic form. The frantic emotional impact of “A. Rimbaud’s” final act is no different from that of Hollywood’s most extravagant epics, but its most intimate delivery comes from a kind of maverick indie spirit that demands a complete reorientation of audiovisual language in a way that few modern experimenters would attempt using traditional technology. This is a look back at an old, established form of storytelling and challenge it from within, effectively forcing new forms into the box of cinema as Wang uses his camera, actors, and imagination to transform what is expected and what is possible.
