The Last City (Heinz Emigholz, 2020) (Patreon)

As I briefly mentioned on Letterboxd, I wasn't really prepared for The Last City, which as far as I am concerned is Heinz Emigholz's "Hal Hartley film." Think about it. Much like Hartley's Flirt or The Girl From Monday, The Last City is a highly stylized, semi-low budgeted, globetrotting film about characters who, to a large extent, are embodiments of ideas rather than psychologically rendered individuals. And, as in Flirt, or even certain mid-period Todd Solondz films (Palindromes, Storytelling), there is an overt structure that ties all of the segments and performers together. It's a gas.

If Streetscapes [Dialogue]  was a duet, and The Lobby a solo, this is a quintet in five distinct movements. Emigholz, always concerned with space and geography, embeds a puzzle-pun in the title. The "last city" does not imply finality so much as a previous location. Where am I this time? If it's Tuesday, it must be Belgium, etc. The Last City is in part a joke about creative geography and the cinema's ability to whisk us away to places far and wide, much like our dreams. (He addressed this quite theoretically in The Lobby, but this film, which might well be called "The Cinema," takes us right inside and shows us what raconteur Jon Erdman was going on about, as a post hoc prelude to the true-blue movie magic of this film.

One of the actors is transferred from one segment to the next, with that previous segment being explained as that "character's" dream. So a single actor appears as two fairly different figures from one moment to the next, in two completely different locales. (The five cities: Be'er Sheva, Athens, Berlin, Hong Kong, and São Paolo.) Two of the defining aspects of the "dream work," according to Freud, are condensation and displacement. Condensation: lots of different ideas taking the form of a single figure. Displacement: one figure substituting for another. These are basic semiotic elements of narrative cinema as well.

For example, we often recall dreams and note "you were there, but it wasn't 'you'." This is a key principle of acting. So in segment two, a man (Erdman) wakes up next to his younger self (Young Sun Han). Next, that young man is sleeping with his brother (Laurean Wagner) with the full approval of his mother (Dorothy Ko). Next, the mother is an angry Chinese woman confronting a Japanese woman (Susanne Sachsse) about her nation's violent colonialist past. And so forth.

Not only is Emigholz's casting race-blind. He has actors performing roles that run specifically counter to their racial and ethnic identity. Now, within the politically correct practices of contemporary filmmaking, especially in Hollywood, such casting would be offensive. (This has as much to do with labor opportunities -- depriving minority actors of available roles -- as it does questions of ethnic mimicry.) But Emigholz seems to suggest that cinema, if it truly functions like a dream and is therefore an emanation of the unconscious, is lawless. It is not subject to our social strategies, and in fact can reveal the very fissures that perhaps require negotiation in waking life.

So let's be clear. Emigholz has made dozens of films exploring architecture. They were not dreams. They were as concrete and rational as you please. But if and when he broaches the question of fictional narrative, he is going to the heart of its very mechanisms. Emigholz understands that the simple act of believing in the presence of patently absent human beings, and investing them with lives and desires and relationships, is perverse. So The Last City narrativizes that perversity. Don't be fooled by the crisp compositions and constructivist editing. Heinz Emigholz is just as whacked out as Guy Maddin.