_Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day_

[septimus_...@q.com]

"The year the war came to a close was the year I fell in love
for the first time. Whether it was with a person, a place,
or just an idea, I couldn't have said. Later of course, I
realized it was all of these. At the start of that summer
though, I hadn't a clue that nothing will ever be the same."

-- John Lee, in _Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day_

The unassuming voiceover in the prologue belies the scope of
Christopher
Munch's first cinematic Great American Novel. Like his subsequent
_Sleep Time Gal_, the writer-director's 1996 film is deceptively
intimate, as idiosyncratic as random pages fallen out of a stranger's
diary. The grandeur of the story only slowly reveals itself, like
Yosemite Valley unobtrusively rising out of the mist in the opening
scenes, its mountain ranges eventually soaring halfway to heaven.
A little-known chapter of the nation's history shimmers behind this
poetic coming-of-age story, telescopes out of it, so that every frame
acquires a haunted, incandescent intensity. Protrayed as a young
dreamer in _Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day_, the reluctant
entrepreneur John Lee is introspective to a fault, seemingly born
to pore over historical newsreel footage and watch rail tracks
receding from his speeding trains. Empire-building Charles Kane
he is not; the hero of Munch's film is far, far more interesting.

Lee (Peter Alexander)'s golden-boy looks disguise his existential
unease. The august surname and melancholy suggest Southern
aristocracy -- Walker Percy's Binx Bollings gone to seed -- but he
is a new breed, haunted by other spectres of defeat. Of mixed
French and Chinese descent, he seems to belong only in some
nebulous dreamscape (an impression heightened by Todd Sweeney's
award-winning black-and-white cinematography), can find his bearing
only in cracks in the fabrics of society. When the film begins during
WWII, his family is driving through the Yosemite national park. A
stop at a station along the troubled railway and he has fallen for
that femme fatale. With money from a Colorado investor, he briefly
saves the railway company, becoming a local folk hero. _Color of
a Brisk and Leaping Days_ is a first-person narration of this year-
long
bittersweet reverie.

Lee is a hopeless romantic, in love with words, women, and trains.
Forever obsessed with baroque phrases which he quotes in postcards
and funerals. ("I long to hold in my hand the fate of men ...")
Worldly
types, like the concert pianist he initially pursues, see through him
and stay away. He finds the ideal mistress in the serene, intelligent
Nancy, who fairly sparkles in his sea dream. Making love to her
he wonders aloud why all good things come to an end. "You're here,
I'm here, it hasn't ended," she reassures him like a mother would.
As his business fades, he squats alone on the shore, isolated in the
frame, away from Nancy and her wine-dark waves. Losing both the
railway he loves and the woman who loves him, he seeks comfort with
Chinatown prostitutes and mulls his character flaws. Like Faulkner's
idioit he remembers not the pleasure but only its loss, and the
firelight is still the same bright shape of sleep. Only his words
remain with him.

Munch transforms the locomotive, an universal obsession of young
boys, into a metaphor for progress and nostalgia, unification and
apartheid. Nothing connotes the passage of time like the sight of
sleepers on railbeds receding from view. Een in the 1940s passenger
trains are out of favor; the automobile has become more fashionable.
But it is not just that John doesn't grow up. His grandfather
helped build the Central Pacific Railroad, uniting the Pacific and
Midwest tracks. As shown in newsreel footage, immigrant laborers
like him laid down tracks with hand tools across the Sierra Nevada,
sometimes at 20 below, only to be stigmatized by the Chinese
Immigrant Act. John's father was lucky, scoreing a business in
Chinatown and marrying in Paris after the WWI armistice. Looking
for his own niche, yet haunted by all that heritage, he invests
his entire material and spiritual well-being, in the Yosemite Valley
line, itself an outsider among railways, pinched between robber
barons' giant grids.

It is entirely in character, in Munch's low-key taboo-blind universe,
that John's unlikely paramour Nancy (Jeri Arrendondo, who calls to
mind
Q'orianka Kilcher at the end of _The New World_'s) is an American-
Indian park ranger. She runs a gift shop in the Yosemite, struggling
to preserve endangered Indian tongues. At the end of the film, near
the end of their relationship, Nancy and John take a last train ride
together. They visit a ghost town filled with Chinese immigrant
relics
as though for old time's sake, and their rapport there explains their
mutual attraction and renders more unbearable their rift. Without the
need for words they share a sense of loss, an acknowledgement that
changes come too quickly; the nostalgia, as ever, tinged with
resignation,
recognition of equality earned over time, of bigotry transcended.

John himself easily passes for a rich whiteboy (as Nancy calls him,
in a scene that might have come out of _Light in August_), but his
sister Wendy is mistaken for Japanese by grunts returning from WWII.
Do those taunts goad her to marry a Yankee fighter pilot back East?
I can readily picture her: morphing from free-spirited heiress to
sharp-tongued WASP homemaker. She can take care of herself. The
siblings share a playful relationship, frolicking, kissing each other
on the mouth; the tone is less perverse than coy and innocent,
although
it recalls Munch's _Harry and Max_ about two incestuous singers and
teen idols. In a few scenes Munch and actress Diana Larkin give Wendy
a life of her own, an exuberance that lingers in our mind. Too bad
Larkin never made another film. It is a testimony to Munch's superb
intellect and empathy to have crafted such complex, unusal characters,
completely integrated into American culture yet forever apart from it,
when too many Asian American filmmakers settle for hackneyed drama
and cheap laughs about generational-cultural conflicts.

The pop singer Michael Stipe plays a fellow railway-geek who can fix
all things mechanical; he secretly resents Nancy, and his repressed
affection for his boss may spring from more than brotherly love.
Lee's
real father figure is an old rail-hand on the Valley Railway who helps
him find his way in the world, whose passing he mourns as deeply as
the company's demise. These minor characters are distinguished by the
way the actors underplay them, swallowing their lines rather than
drawing
undue attention, so that they are all the more natural and compelling.
As in _The Sleepy Time _Gal_, the vastness, diversity, and rich
history
of the United States are key players in their own right. The opening
frames of the film immediately establish the geographical and
emotional
shifts to come: Yosemite valley obscured by clouds, waterfalls
steaming
down cliffs; trains rounding a lakeshore segue to a tableau of staid
suburban box-houses ,already prefiguring the protagonist's flight
into the wild. Charles Ives' atmospheric "The Unanswered Question"
over the opening credits gives way to a discordant, urbane Scriabin,
and _Color_ is back in WWII, the world of jazz, Los Angeles, Denver.
rumors of D.C. These transitions give the film a surreal tone, like
something out of an illogical and unusually vivid dream.

By the old Terrence Malick rule, that two great films crown a master,
Munch might have been regarded as one long ago. It would be remiss
not to mention his parallel to Malick: the Erik Satie score, the first
person voiceover; the use of the Ives piece and the biblical quote
in the opening credits even anticipate _The Thin Red Line_ and _The
Tree of Life_. All of Munch's films could have been titled _Days of
Heaven_, with the sense that paradise is already lost in the prologue,
characters jumping on trains to unknown futures at the end of films.
But _Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day_ is uniquely Munch too, down
to its autobiographical touches. Both John Lee and Munch grew up in
Pasadena; one wonders how much of his own love of literary quotes
(the title comes from a poem by Octavia Paz), contrariness, and
romanticized sense of failure the director sublimates into John Lee's
railway dreams. _Color_ is that rare, personal film with a quiet
sense
of greatness; it unobstrusively carries the richness of a novel, the
rhythm of a poem, the clarity of an essay. It is the first
masterpiece
of a director whose best work may still lie in the future.

(for
A.)