(Ed. Note: This was originally published at Image Facts.)
The first time I saw Tape I could hardly take it. It is relentless, theCome and See of thirtysomethings in the 90’s. It is a film about regret and forgiveness, about getting something of your chest, the torment of raw guilt. And, as an adapted stage play, it takes place in a claustrophobic one-act script, a single hotel room out of which its three players never venture, and a really tight editing style. So while watching Tape I get overtaken by the relentless dialogue, this small little room, and all the energy that is being built up inside of it. Linklater controls the material so well, choreographing his actors in this tiny space and ratcheting up the moral tension. I get anxious to get out of this little room, to take a break from all this talking. And ultimately that is the point, as this is an excellent metaphor for guilt and forgiveness, or at least for “getting something off your chest.” The relief marked “conclusion” in our minds is the only way out.
I often wonder what it is in Linklater’s past that makes him so keen on these themes, things like memory, forgiveness, and relationship. Most of his films (excluding than Bad News Bears,Dazed and Confused, and School of Rock which linger in a limbo of intentionality that make them hard to really categorize) that is not overtly concerned with these points of interest. As demonstrated in the Surise/Sunset films and Tape, Linklater has a knack for representing memory and regret along with how they relate to the objectiveness of morality. The conundrum most of his characters find themselves in is completely Pascalian: Why do I feel this way if there is no such thing as ethics? (A very Generation X version of the original Pascalian axiom: Why do I feel this way if there is no such thing as God/gods/G-D/what-have-you?) While such questions aren’t foregrounded in Tape, they are an inescapable part of the viewing process.
And this is all somehow linked to his propensity for making films that take place over one day, or even in real time. He films events rather than stories, making an entire film out of what would be just one scene in most others. Any time I see a film that takes place in real-time I can’t help but think of it as some sort of therapy, as a way of a director working something out for himself and for us by means of a detailed investigation of a moment, conversation, or argument. This psychological tack pops up thematically in bothWaking Life and A Scanner Darkly, which seem to me to enhance a transcendent quality in films like Tape, or even the Sunrise/Sunsetfilms, which is not immediately apparent. In Before Sunset, for example, we don’t just have two people walking the green streets of Paris in real time. We have two people, minute by minute, second by second, corresponding and relating to each other in gestures and responses unmediated by narrative time. In this almost Kafka-like insistence on detail, Linklater develops something greater than the sum of its parts. Likewise the relentless morality of Tape is linked to its resolute pace, it is an unflinching, unediting gaze.
Maybe the best comparison I can think of for this aspect of Tapewould be that sequence in A Man Escaped in which Bresson almost painstakingly films Fontaine slowly prying that little piece off the door of his cell. Tape has this same element of almost absurd particularity, though applied to a conversation between these three people. There is a formal analogy that can be made between the act of removing that bit from the door and the act of conversing in Tape, and both succeed in become something much greater in scale then they are in fact. Linklater’s formal success inTape may make it his most successful film. (Not his best, but the most successful.)
It may be worth comparing Linklater’s “moral” film-making and that of Rohmer. These are two very contrasting styles with effective results. What would a Linklater remake of Claire’s Knee look like, for example?