After telling my friend Guy Atkinson I am working on a location-specific anthology movie, he sent me a link to this Guardian article about a Havana-set anthology cut from the same cloth as Paris, je T'aime and New York, I Love You. In this context an anthology refers to a feature film made up of shorter stand-alone segments, a bit like a collection of short stories.
Emmanuel Benbihy, who produced Paris and New York, had a different writer and director work on each segment of those two films each based on the theme of love in their respective cities. While great adverts for the cities, the premise has come into criticism for only showing their lighter sides. Last year I saw a advert for scripts for a British production called London, Fuck You intended to subvert the style. How successful this was I am not sure.
The narrative problems I alluded to in the title refer the effect on the audience of being hit with (in the case of Paris) eighteen short stories one after another. The cumulative result can leave the viewer feeling a bit like this:
So can anything be done to reduce this fatigue?
In a word "Yes", and some of it was implemented in Paris, je T'aime's sequel New York, I Love You.
When programming blocks of shorts for the Electric Lantern Festival and its predecessor, the Lantern Festival, I and my colleagues found it hard to programme more than about 45 minutes of shorts together before the cumulative narrative would saturate the audience. While all the shorts were of a very high quality and varied subjects, people - including myself - would just start to get fidgety after three quarters of an hour.
The reason?
Writers may well recognise a graph similar to this from most screenwriting books.
It describes how the plot's "stakes" are raised as the story progresses. I have a few issues with this graph, and it is not always apparent in my own work, but it does describe a simple principle.
If we were to plot the same graph for a film like Paris, je T'aime, it could well end up looking like this:
A narrative saw-blade. It is the effect many people reported at the end of Return of the King. The numerous mini-resolutions robbed the film of a proper resolution. In The Two Towers the plot builds towards three concurrent conflicts - Aragorn defending Helm's Deep, Frodo and Sam at Osgiliath and Merry and Pippin with Treebeard and his attack on Isengard. All these stories climaxed more or less at once followed by a short wrapping up. In Return of the King, by contrast, the cluster-fuck of consecutive resolutions left the audience feeling as though it had been Tangoed by a Balrog.
We simply cannot keep up that level of emotional investment without succumbing to a kind of movie shell-shock and, like traumatised soldiers, our only defence is in emotional numbness. The images stop affecting us.
One solution popular at the moment is to chop up the single threads and intercut them. While not officially an anthology film, Richard Curtis's Love Actually may as well have been called London, I Love You. Rather than run its ten (admittedly connected) narrative threads one after the other, the decision was made to intercut them. In much the same way as Peter Jackson edited The Two Towers, the stories stand alone then, when one starts to drag, we cut to another one. In this way the storylines all come to a head at once allowing for maximum cathartic effect. This technique was also used on are they/aren't they anthologies Short Cuts and Scenes of a Sexual Nature.
In many ways I think of Amélie as an anthology film. There are several distinct stories running through the film, each only connected by Amélie herself. So another way is to take one character's story and "hang" other stories off it like clothes on a washing line.
One style that used to be popular but I have not seen for a while is to have a "framing story". This method was used in the 1945 Ealing Studios horror anthology The Dead of Night. In that film a party guest is convinced he has seen the other guests in a dream. As he explains, others chip in, and some of his predictions start coming true it gives the guests the chance to tell various horror stories. The framing story seems to have the effect of providing a buffer between the stories, allowing the audience to catch its emotional breath, as well as having its own resolution it is driving towards.
So earlier I said New York, I Love You seemed to have learned from Paris, je T'aime's mistakes. In a way it seems to employ both a framing story and the intercutting techniques I mentioned earlier. By having recurring characters and locations, there is a greater sense of wholeness than in its predecessor, where the segments were run one after another.
And what approach will I take for my own production?
The truth is I've not decided yet. Each has its advantages and draw-backs. One thing I have realised is that the emotional fatigue is compounded if the segments are structurally short stories. The effect is lessened if each plays out like a scene or group of scenes without each trying to hit a great emotional high. This is evident in Jim Jarmusch's 2003 anthology Coffee and Cigarettes. Despite containing eleven consecutive stories and running to 90 minutes it is easy to watch in one sitting. Admittedly the low-key, dreamy quality of the segments may not be to everyone's taste, but it worked for me. The individual stories play out like scenes intercut from different stories - they are vignettes.
Regardless of the solution the challenge facing any writer, director or producer of an anthology, in whole or in part, is to make it more than the merely the sum of its parts.
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