Let us now praise non-famous men. Such is the invocation that Ethan Hawke, as a director, prefers to obey. In his previous film, with its Salingerian title of “Seymour: An Introduction” (2015), he paid tribute to a piano teacher named Seymour Bernstein—not proclaiming him an undercherished genius but delicately digging through his past and noting his knack for inspiring the talents of others. In Bernstein’s words, “I’m not so sure that a major career is a healthy thing to embark upon.” Try saying that in Beverly Hills, and you’ll be run out of town.
Now we have “Blaze,” which presents us with Blaze Foley, a singer-songwriter who was not yet forty when he died in Austin, Texas, in 1989. Although one of his songs, “If I Could Only Fly,” was recorded by Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson, Blaze is little known outside country-music circles. Even within them, to judge by the film, he spent less time at the hub than on the rim, forever liable to spin out of control. “Do you ever feel like you’re not goin’ be alive much longer?” he says one night, in a bar. The owner replies, “The way you live, that’s not much of a premonition. That’s wishful thinkin’.”
A casual glimpse of “Blaze” might suggest that, like “Seymour: An Introduction,” it’s a documentary. Much of it consists of folks sitting around cracking jokes and noodling on guitars. A lot of breeze gets shot. But this is a feature film, and Blaze is played by Ben Dickey: three parts musician, two parts actor, and, on the available evidence, one part bear. It’s a lived-in and sometimes lovable performance, nicely offset by that of another musician, Charlie Sexton, as Townes Van Zandt—a buddy of Blaze’s, a more leathery figure, and, for country aficionados, a bigger name. We watch Townes and a pal, Zee (Josh Hamilton), being interviewed on the radio—the host is Hawke himself—and asked for their memories of Blaze. So towering are the tales that emerge that you cease trying to sift the fantastical from the true. Did Townes honestly dig up Blaze’s grave, prise open the casket (“He was grinnin’ ”), and extract from the corpse’s breast pocket a pawn slip, in order to redeem a borrowed guitar? I hope so.
Watching Hawke’s film is like turning the dial on the radio as you drive, and refusing to settle for a whole tune. Snatches of different narratives keep breaking in. There’s a heartrending cameo from Kris Kristofferson, and a host of flashbacks to Blaze’s early passion for Sybil Rosen (Alia Shawkat), an actress—“Beautiful little Jewish girl, kinky hair,” he says. At the start, the couple dwell in paradise and poverty, in a forest, and Hawke aims to match them in the economy of his staging; a whispered conversation in a closet is illuminated only by a lighter, and their wedding is dramatized by a slow-motion jump into the air. Another theme, strewn throughout the film, is that of Blaze’s final day on earth, much of it spent performing at the Outhouse, in Austin, or halting the performance to ruminate aloud on the cosmos and the act of creation. Some songs, he says, never see the light, “on account of me not being able to live up to what I was s’posed to be.”
The trouble, naturally, was drink. Is it ever anything else, in fables such as this? The man was like an inland sea of booze, and I suspect that Dickey’s Blaze is less of a monster, in his cups, than the real thing used to be. But his decline is all too plausible, and the second hour of the movie slackens and slumps a little, as if even the editing process were blurred by the fumes of alcohol. (Also, we get less of Sybil, who tires of her husband’s carousing, and that means less of Shawkat, whose genial and restive energy is a boost to any scene.) Saddest of all, we come to Blaze’s end, which was brutal and predictably confused. The film hardly clarifies matters, opting instead for the gentlemanly pathos of his passing: badly wounded, he takes off his hat, as if greeting a lady, then lies down in the road, under the cover of night. What Hawke has provided here, with plenty of grace and a minimum of fuss, is an elegy for a life that went missing, more smolder than blaze, and a chance to hear the songs of the unsung.
The French actor Vincent Lindon has one of the great faces in modern cinema. He’s not yet sixty, but is already so creased with care that it’s hard to imagine him in the springtime of his youth, if he ever had one. Looking at him is like reading an old newspaper that you found at the back of a drawer. He seems in perpetual need of a shave and a good night’s sleep, and you sense that he has seen too much of the world, through those exhausted eyes, to lend it his trust.
Lindon’s lugubrious air served him well in “The Measure of a Man” (2016), in which his character strove to stay afloat, despite the loss of one job and the quest for another, and the losing lingers in “The Apparition.” Here he plays a reporter, Jacques Mayano, who returns from the Middle East in mourning after his colleague, a photographer, is killed. Jacques, withdrawing into himself, is plucked from the gloom by a phone call from the Vatican—a far cry from his usual war zones, though hardly free from strife. A senior cleric invites him to join a Canonical Investigation Commission, which will examine an event that occurred in southern France. Or maybe nothing occurred; that’s what Jacques, in company with a psychiatrist, a theologian, and a couple of priests, is instructed to find out. As he is told, in Rome, “the Church would rather bypass a veritable phenomenon than validate a sham.”
Here’s the nub. A teen-age girl, Anna (Galatéa Bellugi), claims to have had a vision—an apparition, in Church parlance—of the Virgin Mary, and only one of them is available for interview. We never witness the apparition; the writer and director, Xavier Giannoli, does not heed the example of Henry King, who, in “The Song of Bernadette” (1943), showed Jennifer Jones on her knees in the grotto at Lourdes, irradiated by the light of a lady in the niche. In Anna’s case, all that we have to go on is her word, plus the preternatural calm of her demeanor. The pilgrims who have heard her account, however, are satisfied. Flocking to her secluded village by the coachload, some of them in wheelchairs, they reach out to touch her as she passes, or hold up their rosaries. Merchandise is also available. You want a snow globe, with an image of Anna inside? Eight euros, please.
Tone, or a dissonant layering of tones, is what counts most in a tale of this kind. Giannoli is not out to mock the afflicted or to scold the credulous, as William Wellman did in “Nothing Sacred” (1937). What satire there is resides in the casting—in priests like Anton Meyer (Anatole Taubman), who spies his chance to milk a miracle (“Praise be to God! All the Internet links are working”), or the creepy Father Borrodine (Patrick d’Assumçao), with his Hitlerish swipe of black hair, who is proud of his young parishioner, and enters her room at night to sit on the bed. You grit your teeth, but she simply takes his hand and says, “I know the mother of God will protect us.” From what? Is Anna really so worried by Jacques and his colleagues, and by what they might unveil?
For regular moviegoers, “The Apparition” will seem most remarkable for what it is not. So accustomed are we to yarns of demonic possession that the beatific equivalent comes as quite a shock. No howling fiends are in attendance. Nobody’s head swivels around. Hell fails utterly to gape. Instead, we find traditional tropes of Christian suffering: Anna stretched out on the floor, arms flung wide, or torn by thorns as she staggers through a wood. There is even a clever riff on the Assumption, involving a helicopter—closer to the airplane that brings the Angel Gabriel, in Godard’s sublime “Hail Mary” (1985), I would say, than to the chopper that ferries a statue of Jesus at the start of “La Dolce Vita” (1960), fuelled by Fellini’s surreal mirth. Loveliest of all, in Giannoli’s film, are the feathers. Anna is a novice at a convent, where she helps the nuns with their quilt-making. Afterward, they stand in a circle, picking stray plumes and tufts from one another’s clothes. Maybe that’s what angels do, valeting their wings at the end of a hard day’s flight.
For a while, the story follows Jacques’s point of view, only to switch to Anna’s. He becomes a sleuth, tracing her childhood path through foster care, but we are then offered clues about her that he has no access to, and we ask ourselves, To whom does this film belong? To the grizzled skeptic, or to the pale and serenely smiling girl, with her unshakable faith? (The musical score, laden with Arvo Pärt, nudges us too often toward the latter.) Near the end, far from France, we get a solution of sorts—offhand and oblique, yet I must confess that, days later, I can’t stop thinking about it. “How can we believe in what eludes our gaze?” Jacques asks. A good question, for anyone enraptured by the mystery of the movies. “The Apparition” is hiding more than it shows. ♦
