Paul Thomas Anderson sets three Thom Yorke songs to fifteen minutes of dance, and the opening carriage of twitching commuters is worth the quarter of an hour on its own. The middle leans too long on one idea; the ending earns its calm.
Paul Thomas Anderson calls Anima a one-reeler, and he means it: fifteen minutes, three songs from Thom Yorke’s album of the same name, no dialogue, and Yorke himself in a cap being shoved about by a city that has not noticed him. Anderson has made music videos before, for Radiohead among others, and this is longer than any of those and shorter than anything else he has put his name to. It wants to be a silent film with a modern score, and for most of its running time it is one. We would give it the quarter of an hour, and we would give it a proper screen.
The first song is the best thing in it. Darius Khondji lights the carriage so the fluorescent tubes drain every face to the same grey, and a dozen commuters in dark coats sit nodding off. Then the nodding becomes a dance: a head drops and jerks back, a shoulder twitches, and the twitch travels down the row of seats like a current through a wire. Andy Jurgensen cuts on the beat for the first few bars, then stops cutting and lets the carriage sway. We laughed at the first head-drop. We had stopped laughing by the fourth, because we recognised the posture from every early train we have ever taken, and it is not a comfortable thing to see from the outside.
Yorke is not a trained dancer and the film is built so that he does not need to be. He is the one body in the carriage that moves slightly out of time, and the choreography uses that: the ensemble, Frida Dam Seidel, Joseba Yerro Izaguirre, Dorotea Saykaly and the rest, are precise, and he is a man trying to keep up with his own sleep. When a woman across the aisle (Dajana Roncione) leaves her small case on the seat, he picks it up and follows her off the train, and the station turns on him. Turnstiles refuse him and a crowd presses him backwards against the barrier. He plays all this with the patience of a silent comedian, letting each thing happen to him and registering it half a second late.
The middle song is where the film dawdles. Petr Kunc’s production design gives Anderson a wide tilted plane of concrete, a plaza that leans like a ship’s deck, and the dancers slide down it on their backs while Yorke tries to walk up. It is the clearest idea in the film and also the one that lasts longest. By the third slide we were aware of how much of the song was left, which is not something you want to feel in a fifteen-minute film. The reviews so far have been mostly warm, with one dissent calling the film directionless. We think it has a direction, but this is the stretch where it loses its footing, and the dissent has a point here.
The last song puts it right. Night, a street of cobbles and shuttered shops, lamps throwing long shadows, and Roncione back in the frame. Khondji’s light softens for the first time, and the track opens up with it, the bass giving way to a slow wash of synthesiser; Nigel Godrich shares the music credit with Yorke, and this is the stretch where the record sounds most like a film score. What follows is a duet rather than a chase, and Anderson shoots it close enough that you can see Yorke concentrating on his feet. We will not say where the night ends. We will say that the final shot, which involves a tram and a change in the light, moved us more than fifteen minutes had any right to, and that it did so with Yorke’s face doing almost nothing.
Set against Anderson’s features, this is a small thing on purpose. The lonely man in a drab coat being buffeted by the world is a figure he has drawn before, most clearly in Punch-Drunk Love, and Anima is that film’s distant cousin: the same anxiety, the same late tenderness, a tenth of the length. The question with any film attached to an album is whether it stands without the record. This one does, mostly. You will follow what is happening without having heard a note beforehand, though you will probably want to hear the rest afterwards.
Watch it late, on the largest screen you own, with the sound up. It is fifteen minutes long. We have sat through trailers for longer, and enjoyed them less.
