Stan Brakhage Meets Jason Bourne

I watched The Bourne Ultimatum last night. It's a pretty spectacular piece of craftsmanship. Damon is convincingly brutal and desperate as the most existential of action film protagonists and the script is solid, but it's really Paul Greengrass who owns this thing and gives it such merciless, jittery energy.

A lot of people complained about the paranoid-twitchy handheld camera Greengrass used for The Bourne Supremacy, but I loved it, and he has taken it to extremes in the third film. Look how the camera goes absolutely fucking nuts as Bourne races after another assassin (played by the bendy Joey Ansah) through the streets and rooftops of Tangiers... it's like a Stan Brakhage film with little glimpses of Matt Damon's face interrupting a bunch of abstract beige shapes. Which is a strange way to describe a sequence that's absolutely riveting.

Greengrass has married a cinema verite sensibility to the structure of a mainstream action thriller, but it's the indie instinct that proves dominant. Ultimatum has the urgency of a film like Requiem for a Dream, by which I mean that by the time you walk out, your jaw aches from being clenched... the various CIA hitmen and "rendition" operatives are always just an instant behind Bourne, and Greengrass fills his shots with authority figures and cold white security cameras. He also dispenses with the studied rhythms of classical Hollywood cinema; there are only a few go ahead, breathe now moments, and those that exist end with a merciful quickness. You can always feel the hunters lurking in the background.

Along with Alfonso Cuaron, who directed last year's Children of Men (another formally innovative and existentially troubled masterpiece passing as a genre film), Greengrass is in a rare and enviable position for any artist. He hasn't "sold out" by allowing his style to be suffocated by the demands of filming major studio pictures, but by virtue of the hugely successful Bourne Supremacy (and Ultimatum is going to be a massive success, too, I think) he has wide latitude to select future projects through which he can continue to explore the themes in which he's shown a particular interest (asymmetric warfare, most obviously) since Bloody Sunday. Imperial Life in the Emerald City, his next project, should provide ample opportunity in this regard. Can't wait to see it. (And can't wait to see Ultimatum a second time.) The man's one of the great modern directors, I think... I hope he takes full advantage of the opportunity he's got right now.