Illuminating darkness through the humanity of filmmaking

Eric Nazarian’s The Blue Hour

by Jo Nelsen

Published: Saturday February 23, 2008

Eric Nazarian.

Writer-director Eric Nazarian believes there is a common humanity that connects all of us - even strangers. "I want people to realize how fragile life is. I want cinema to engage," he says. "The curse is indifference." And in our world of advanced global communications, how easy it is to overlook a neighbor next-door. Film can change that.

It is with a compassionate heart that Nazarian created his first feature film, The Blue Hour. Shot in Los Angeles, a city celebrated for movie stars and mansions, Nazarian's film is far removed from the glitz of Hollywood and the affluence of its inhabitants. The 31-year-old writer-director has given us instead a mature and haunting film of love and loss that takes place along the Los Angeles River.

Proving beauty to be in the eye of the beholder, Nazarian finds an unforgettable loveliness in the concrete channel regarded as nothing more than an eyesore by many. The river Nazarian presents is an enchanted one - a view inspired, no doubt, by childhood memory. Walking with his grandfather by the Los Angeles River, after coming to America at age 4, is his first conscious memory of the city.

"All of the shots I composed and photographed throughout the film are places where I grew up riding my bike," Nazarian explains. "Each has a special significance. I'm very happy the film is inspiring people to look at the L.A. River with a more interested eye."

The film

The idea for The Blue Hour came from growing up in the multi-ethnic and divided city of Los Angeles in the time of the 1991 L.A. Riots, Nazarian says. This period opened his eyes to the immigrant experience, nurturing a curiosity about everyday people from different backgrounds.

So it is the lives of people living near the river - lives that inevitably intersect - that are of utmost importance. Nazarian wrote what appear to be four separate lives, and he wants us, the audience, to connect the dots. "My hope is that these stories about youth, adulthood, middle age, and old age offer ‘open windows' into life on the ‘other side' of Los Angeles."

Aptly named for l'heure bleue, the hour between daylight and darkness, the film follows his characters during the time they experience an event that brings about a shift in their lives - from light into the darkness of tragedy.

The first episode records the obsessive, creative life of a young graffiti artist, named Happy, who runs passionately to produce her art each day on the banks of the river. Plugged into a headset of throbbing hip-hop, she is eager and inspired, despite a tough neighborhood of barred doors and windows and argumentative adults at home. She hurries to paint her dreams - in particular, the face of a weeping female clown, the Payasa. Though she crosses paths with a man who lives amongst the reeds on an island in the river, they do not communicate. She learns of his death through a radio announcement.

The second story is that of a couple who lose their precious four-year-old daughter to the river. Nazarian opens this segment with iconic close-ups of the little girl laughing and tossing leaves into the sky. When she is drowned, her parents are inconsolable. Juxtaposed with flashbacks of family times, their grief is recorded in the recurring image of a makeshift shrine - candles spreading golden light over the photo of their little girl.

The third segment depicts the story of a man visiting his dying mother with his guitar and a single flower. He carries both on a daily trek from his hotel room to the hospital. Despite pleas to siblings, he performs the vigil alone.

The final episode follows an elderly pensioner dealing with the loss of his wife. Who will ever forget the image of Humphrey, stretched out on his back on the grass beside her newly dug grave, staring up at the sky, fingering old photos, bringing her lilies and a glass of wine?

Background in film

Asked about filmmakers who influenced his work, Nazarian bursts into a long list, bubbling over like an excited kid at the memory of directors, writers, titles, scenes, and actors he respects and admires. Details are all right there at his fingertips; I can't keep up with my pen. An inexhaustible catalogue of names and titles tumbles forth: Elia Kazan, John Ford, Stephen Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, Andrei Tarkovsky, Bertolucci, Altman, Fellini, Schindler's List, America America, Citizen Kane, Sunset Boulevard, Lawrence of Arabia, West Side Story, On the Waterfront, Dr. Zhivago, The Great Escape, The Grapes of Wrath, To Kill a Mockingbird....

"I feel like I was there when they were making those films," Nazarian says. Throughout our discussion, he is most emphatic about one point: "I never, never wanted to do anything else. My goal was always to be become a filmmaker."

Unique style

Though steeped in film history, and a graduate of the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television, where he majored in film production, Nazarian is no copycat. He has a style of filmmaking all his own.

Nazarian never relies on dialogue to explain his story. In 66 pages of script, there are only four pages of dialogue, constituting four to five minutes in 93 minutes of film, in keeping with renowned screenwriter William Goldman's belief that "Dialogue is one of the least important parts of any flick."

Common understanding has it that if we lose one of our senses, the others sharpen. The blind hear more acutely, and the deaf see details others do not. So, without the easy/normal reliance on dialogue, the viewer of Nazarian's film naturally becomes more attuned to peripheral aspects that might have gone unnoticed. In the absence of snappy one-liners, details that inform are about eye contact, the touch of a hand, the contents of a poor man's cupboards, or the sound a cane makes along a sidewalk. With less dialogue, we see and feel more - just as in real life, when, for instance, we come home to find a partner has deserted us, the creak of the bed we collapse onto, a sound magnified in the aching silence, is more powerful than words.