Before manhood, “Boyhood”
November 8, 2014 § Leave a comment
For those as interested in artistry and artisanship as they are the resultant art – in particular, those whose ultimate appreciation of a film is in some way dependent on or at least significantly influenced by their knowledge of the process by which said film found its way onto a screen – “Boyhood” is, quite frankly, a cause celebre. Flourish or fail as it might as a film, these folk, whether in it for the geekery or the gossip, would have a wealth of material over which to froth and obsess. So if bulldozing its way onto the cultural main stage and setting tongues a-wagging and thumbs a-typing was a major goal, however knowing or unknowing on the part of Richard Linklater and his collaborators, the film is quite a success, gathering interest, amassing plaudits and netting somewhat unprecedented box-office receipts. But it may very well be that in order to appreciate and appraise this film with any measure of critical heft and incisiveness, one must first acknowledge the degree to which they are awed or unmoved by the film’s backstory.
Immediately prior to the film’s initial festival showings, when its – and this is said without any disrespect – general ‘gimmick’ was the most interesting thing about it, it would not have been necessarily cynical to expect that, at the very least, a subset of the critical response would be positive if not hyperbolically so. By the same token, a more pessimistic hunch that this very gimmick would be the film’s undoing, that “Boyhood” would be at best an admirable attempt at doing something not-quite/quite possibly new and at worst an artistically fraudulent exercise, would have been perhaps equally valid. But now that the film has been seen as widely as one would expect for a nearly three-hour picture without any clearly discernible plot, the unanimity of the acclaim that “Boyhood” has thus far received is almost disorienting. Sight unseen, what this film could possibly do to inspire such an outpouring of adoration was hard to imagine. Having finally seen it, how exactly “Boyhood” manages to inspire such a rightful outpouring of adoration by a means so understated is hard to break down.
While clearly an undertaking of immense patience and faith on the part of the producers involved, “Boyhood” is an out-and-out achievement from a directorial standpoint, for several reasons. One of a director’s core roles in the making of a film – particularly the ‘point A to point B, whatever the route’ narrative type, which “Boyhood” largely is – is tonal integrity. For logistical reasons pertaining to everything from actors’ schedules to location availability, the vast majority of narrative features are shot out of sequence during principal photography. So if scenes that take place in a particular location are shot one after the after regardless of where they exist temporally in the script, it is imperative that the mood, the rhythm, the tone of performance, the subtext of these scenes fit as seamlessly as possible into the overall structure of the piece once it is assembled in the editing suite. Of course, good actors know their characters’ trajectories to a tee, and there is often a script supervisor whose job it is to ensure that the screenplay (however pedantic or scanty) is adhered to as closely as is necessary for purposes of consistency, but there are countless other elements that contribute to a film’s tonal integrity and it is the director’s responsibility to develop a unifying vision with which they approach each sequence, each scene, each shot. On this front, “Boyhood” could have been photographed in five straight months. It is that seamless. For a man who thought it feasible to shoot a film in the way that he did, Richard Linklater, in conjunction with cinematographers Lee Daniel and Shane F. Kelly, was wise to limit his experimentation to using the same actors across the twelve year period because one could swear that – despite the avalanche of new formats the aughts brought – “Boyhood” was shot with the same roll of film judging by the unified quality of all the images. Looking at the picture, the camera is unobtrusive and quietly omniscient, the shot choices present things without necessarily highlighting any particular aspects of said things, and the colour scheme is as unadorned as can be, albeit well saturated and with the kind of clear-eyed shimmer that might be expected of an infant’s vision. Where many indie filmmakers overdo the ‘intimacy’ of their camerawork such that the naturalistic tone for which they seem to be aiming ends up being unbalanced and forced, the images in “Boyhood” are intimate but stately; close, but respectfully so. A more stylised approach could most certainly have been taken, but this would have likely undercut the verite nature of the project, the slice-of-life texturing that the cast and crew were presumably striving to achieve and arguably did achieve, with honours. Perhaps even more remarkably, the tonal balance Linklater manages to strike would be difficult for most filmmakers, even those with a heavily iconoclastic or idiosyncratic signature style that they rarely deviate from, let alone for a filmmaker whose output is so variegated, ranging from independent no-budget landmarks like “Slacker” to more mainstream fare like “School of Rock”. And it’s not as though he began in low-budget territory and eventually settled into a studio throne like Christopher Nolan; he continually dips in and out of either scene as well as the territory that exist between those two scenes, and amidst all this dipping and diving he was making “Boyhood.” And yet, while viewing the film one cannot easily tilt one’s head or squint one’s eye and say, ‘oh, yeah, this was probably shot around the same time that he was making “Bernie”’ or ‘this sequence has “A Scanner Darkly” written all over it.’ So if “Boyhood” proves one thing and one thing only, it is that thing for which many admirers of Linklater admire him; his chameleonic versatility.
As a film, “Boyhood” can take a very comfortable seat beside Linklater’s other major work, the so-called “Before” trilogy (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight). Both projects quite openly exploit the temporal nature of the cinematic medium in order to examine the (countless?) roles that human perceptions of time play in influencing the understanding of oneself, others and the relationship between oneself and others. The true indispensability of “Before Midnight” to the “Before” series rests heavily on its being about a relationship that has finally progressed from being potential to actual, one that is falling – or has perhaps already fallen – victim to the ‘damage’ that time and proximity can inflict on two people who have made the decision to love each other no matter what, but perhaps who have failed to take into account the absolutely golden fact that a relationship between two people is really a threesome, with time being the third and perhaps most vital member. In some ways, this new picture “Boyhood” is a progression on the use of elliptical storytelling so prominent in that series, elliptical as in: the drama in each one of those pictures is predicated on ellipses, which is to say that which the viewer has not seen and never will see; that which has not occurred between characters Jesse and Celine due to their living on different continents in the first two films, or that which has in fact occurred between a married Jesse and Celine but which they as individuals and as a couple have not quite dealt with. The power of those films is dependent on the length (nine actual years between the films) of the ellipses and the low-grade but potent assault on the senses that occurs when the two lovers are forced to come to terms with their expectations of each other, of themselves and of their relationship, none of which time has in any way forgotten and has in any way failed to chew away at. Well, what Linklater and company do with “Boyhood” is to shorten the ellipses by eight years, making them less robust visually and narratively (i.e. more subtle), and then to lay them down next to each other with the thinnest seams possible, the overall effect being that the influence of unseen moments on the development of a character become more insidious. Whereas in the “Before” films, in which the nine-year block that the viewer never actually sees must obviously be jam-packed with significant moments such that there is a strong element of ‘unseen drama,’ the distinction between ‘drama’ and ‘anti-drama’ is less obvious in “Boyhood” and thus more akin to life as it is lived by those of us who could be considered ‘real’ or ‘actual.’ In many ways Richard Linklater and Terrence Malick have very similar cinematic philosophies in that they seem to pay no heed to dramatic hierarchy. Malick will cut away from the ‘main action’ of a movie to focus on a prairie bird pecking at the grass, challenging the idea that Time as an omniscient entity is any more interested in the killing spree of Hollie and Kit in “Badlands” than it is in the bird’s ambling existence. Likewise, by providing a narrative which so obviously contains ellipsis after ellipsis – absences of chunks of times which may or may not contain moments of epiphany or which may or may not be of life-changing consequence – “Boyhood” undoes the dramatic hierarchy which normally elevates the spectacular above the soporific and, in doing so, reinforces the significance of ‘the moment’, a theme that ripples continually beneath the film’s surface and which is explicitly voiced in the dialogue scene that brings the picture to a close.
But if the production details of “Boyhood” are as interesting to a viewer as is knowing what Tolstoy usually had for breakfast while writing Anna Karenina is to a reader, what does “Boyhood” offer other than the novelty of beholding what is effectively a practical special effect; what star Ethan Hawke finds somewhat analogous to time-lapse photography? Are there any neon-lit revelations, observations, proclamations – spoken or otherwise – that would merit a t-shirt slogan or car sticker, or, like most of Linklater’s less mainstream pictures, is “Boyhood” more of a culture medium, an Agar plate for self-reflection, meditation and introspection? The latter is probably more accurate a description than the former. Viewed without much analysis, the picture is a very – almost boldly so – straightforward summary of a period in the life of a family as seen through the growing, ever observant eyes of young Mason Jr. By no means a highlights reel of the highest highs and the lowest lows but rather a gently undulating string of moments of varying significance that may or may not earn the central character his final moment of low-key epiphany, the film succeeds dramatically by simply trusting in the quiet spectacle of the everyday, totally in keeping with the Malickian dramatic democracy previously mentioned. Eschewing the temptation many family dramas succumb to: stealing from Southern Gothic melodrama and placing emotional blowouts and tragedy at every corner, in scripting this movie Linklater and his co-writers (that is to say his actors) understand that drama is an intrinsic aspect of every form and facet of human existence. Most people’s experiences might not necessarily inspire soaring monologues or culminate in calamitous family gatherings that leave onlookers breathless and buzzing, but for those who appreciate that simple moments can and often do contain enough food not just for thought but for a philosophical banquet, films like “Boyhood” through to more clearly avant-garde pieces like “Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” are more than fulfilling; provided that the viewer sets aside a moment or two to truly ruminate on what they’ve seen and consider how it interacts with their own understanding of life.
Chewing on “Boyhood”, it is noticeable how deeply confusing and easily demoralising human temporal perceptions can be. By the time one hour of film time has been and gone it becomes obvious that Ellar Coltrane, the actor portraying Mason Jr, has aged and that several months or years of filmic time have passed (as is the case for his sister Samantha, played by the director’s daughter Lorelai Linklater), but because the march of time is not marked with title cards, a certain degree of nearly imperceptible anxiety flits around like a gnat, at least in this viewer’s gut. Consider that moment when one [in the secular West] realises that the [secular Western] year which had seemed so long on January 1st is suddenly once again preparing for the Christmas-NYE closing out bonanza. How terrifying it is to think that time can appear so slow yet progress so rapidly, and that these two states of awareness – that life is on one hand a grind and on the other a breathless hurtle towards death and immateriality – seem to rarely coexist in harmony with each other, or rather, that most people find it difficult/impossible to appreciate both of these relative truths simultaneously. It’s probably a simple matter of relativity, the kind taught in basic high school physics. Perhaps the person who can get a handle on the fact that living is like sitting in a jetliner at cruise speed – still, slow and potentially tedious in the moment but shooting through space-time from another vantage point – will find themselves in a better place emotionally than does Mason Jr’s mother Olivia at the end of “Boyhood.” Unlike Patricia Arquette’s character who – as admirable a job as she does as nurturer and breadwinner – seems to spend the duration of the film’s twelve years trying to ensure that she will one day look back and be satisfied that she ticked all the boxes, whatever these boxes might be, Mason Jr appears more content with letting life happen to him, to the point of passivity at times. Luckily, he does develop some passion, some drive to counteract his innate tendency to just chill, but is nonetheless content to enjoy the plane ride, second by passing second, rather than constantly review the flight map to see how much time is left till the next destination, the next stage in life. In this sense, Mason Jr is very much like his father, Mason Sr (Ethan Hawke), who on one hand appears to be the clear underachiever of the two parents but who, by the film’s closure, may very well enjoy an overall more dynamic and quite possibly more fulfilling psychic arc. Initially seeming to exist in a fishbowl of ‘moments’ whereas his ex-partner Olivia is much more aware of the general flight plan of a ‘successful’ adult life, Mason Sr, while he may not end up levitating in a state of luminescent enlightenment or swimming in materialistic success, may be the happier and more contented of Mason Jr’s parents, or at least the one who can state with some certainty that the ellipses in his personal story, while unseen by the viewer, did not go unseen, unappreciated or unlived by him. Somehow it seems that Olivia’s final outburst may have something to do with her feeling the acute loss of her own little moments, moments she may have sacrificed in order to raise a family and forge a successful career but which nonetheless add up to a nagging, ethereal sense of disappointment and anticlimax. As for the boy of the titular hood, Ellar Coltrane’s spot-on, low-key performance of the decidedly low-key character of Mason Jr (is Ellar low-key because Mason Jr needs to be low-key or is Mason Jr low-key because Ellar is low-key or does Ellar become low-key after years of intermittently playing low-key Mason Jr?) throws into sharp relief the degree to which his boyhood is a peculiar composite of two parenthoods, one sisterhood, a couple of step siblinghoods, two shitty stepfatherhoods and the childhoods of his friends and peers. For this reason, “Boyhood” is a lucid expression of experiential symbiosis as a key factor in the development of men, women and children alike. In other words: what separates Mason Jr’s boyhood from Olivia’s motherhood? Well, this movie doesn’t seem to take too much notice of any such distinction.
If “Boyhood” has one limitation though, it’s that its success as a film has an overdependence on viewer investment; and if it has one weakness, it is not the use of pop songs as a marker of date and the passage of time (though the soundtrack is far more nuanced than it initially appears to be), but that the film could be catnip for those whose appreciation of art is somehow related to how fitting said artwork is as an expression of their lives, their experiences, their milieu, their sentiments; their childhood. But even as a simple means to take one’s reminiscences and sun-drenched memories for a long walk, which unfortunately seems to be the case for too many of this picture’s champions, the film still hinges on the gentle alchemy of personal experience which, in comparison to an unseemly majority of cinematic product, cannot be that bad an outcome. Whereas many movies function by dousing audiences in sound and image, oftentimes even emotion or intimations of it, “Boyhood” seeks to draw upon whatever reserves of empathy and tendencies for reflection exist within its individual viewers. For this single feat, it earns its plaudits twofold.
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The horror…: “Session 9”
October 31, 2014 § 1 Comment
How interesting it would be to conduct a study in which audience responses to 2001 low-budget horror film “Session 9” are grouped according to whether or not a viewer has previously seen “The Shining” and then compared. It’s always nice to approach a picture respectfully, appraising it on its own terms knowing full well, of course, that no movie is an island, or at least that very few are. Artworks are born these days into a complex post-modern referential lattice wherein a creation can draw upon scores of influences some of which the creator(s) may not even be aware. But this film, “Session 9”, directed by Brad Anderson and featuring not one but two alumni of the “CSI” TV series – David ‘Sunglasses and Canted Neck’ Caruso and Paul Guilfoyle – has too much in common with the 1980 Kubrick classic for the similarities to be a mere coincidence. For a start, both films run on the premise of a large, ostensibly haunted building with a tragic history having some strange parapsychological effect on one or two or all of the core characters and by turns everyone that comes in contact with them or the building. If the commonalities stopped here there may be very little need to even bring up “The Shining” at all. But in addition to the ‘haunted house as psychological battleground’ theme, there are strong whiffs of domestic violence, uxoricide and filicide in “Session 9”; the wife of the film’s iteration of Jack Torrance is called Wendy; there are elements of paranoia, psychosis and multiple personalities (think Tony) which makes sense considering the central building once housed a psychiatric unit; the line between voices of actual ghosts and voices of the subconscious is distinctly blurred; both films pay particular attention to the passage of time and use title cards and looming establishing shots accordingly; disorienting and claustrophobic depictions of a physical space are used to brew fear by way of unfamiliarity; the very last word of “Session 9” is ‘Doc.’ While some of these examples might seem a tad nit-picky, combined with each other their significance simply has to be a little more than purely happenstancial.
“Session 9” depicts several days in the professional lives of five men who comprise an asbestos elimination crew that has been handed the possibly impossible task of stripping a sprawling, long abandoned Victorian-era hospital – Danvers State Hospital, namely – of the noxious fibre in a mere week. Headed by Gordon, played by Brit actor Peter Mullan – Mullan who was so watchable in Jane Campion’s 2013 miniseries “Top of the Lake” – and managed by Caruso’s Phil, the outfit is a tense one from the get-go, partly on account of Hank (Josh Lucas) having pinched Phil’s girlfriend and partly because Gordon just seems off, and this tension plays a considerable part in creating the ominous sense that violence will almost certainly occur, if not at the hands of spectral forces then at the hands of one of these humans ruffians. Early on, as is the case with “The Shining,” the building’s unsettling history is briefly outlined – with special focus on the case of Mary Hobbs and the tragedy that befalls her – by Mike (co-scripter Stephen Gevedon), who then conveniently stumbles across material pertaining to Mary Hobbs and spends the remainder of the film diligently listening his way through nine sessions of recorded audio when he should actually be peeling asbestos from ceilings, hence the film’s title. In reality, this kind of confidential material would have been incinerated or at least gotten rid of once the hospital was shut down, but this is no realist tale and accordingly the film needn’t be judged by this. There is clearly meant to be some parallel drawn between what happened to Mary Hobbs (as per what Mike hears on the tapes) and what is slowly happening to the asbestos crew. How directly these two interact, however, is a bit of a mystery.
Now, it’s one thing for a film to reference another, either as a gesture of reverence on the parts of the filmmakers or from a more academic/canonical standpoint. Is it possible, though, for a movie to outsource its horror beats to an older, superior colleague, which is to say: for those who have seen and been affected by Kubrick’s “The Shining”, if “Session 9” turns out to be acutely scary or just chronically unsettling is it because it recalls/invokes the earlier film in a weirdly Pavlovian way? When ‘Tuesday’ appears starkly in the middle of the screen, backed by a relic of a building somehow reminiscent of the Overlook Hotel, is a unit of terror being uploaded from some store of cinematic memories and played back in a new context? How much of “Session 9” is actually scary on its own merit? Which is a silly question, silly because it is unquestionably silly to assume that someone who has never seen a horror film in their life would not be frightened watching this. Every film should be judged on its own terms, relatively speaking. Unfortunately, there is a creeping sense of mediocrity about “Session 9” which does not help dispel the idea that it is deeply indebted to another movie. This mediocrity is most evident in the last fifteen minutes during which director Anderson and his editing team show how lacking in faith they are is in the film’s powers of suggestion and inception that they feel compelled to confirm – by way of the fractured ‘brain spasm’ expository technique so common to low-budget indie thrillers – that the character who is most clearly losing his marbles throughout the film is in fact the character that ultimately loses his marbles and submits to murderous urges. What a disappointing thud it is, realising that the mystery was never really that mysterious and that the tapes that Mike so religiously listens to are narratively deceiving though thematically consistent; McGuffins really. This depends, of course, on if you consider the building to be haunted or whether you think there is simply something about the physical space that trips a switch in the susceptible character’s brain.
Perhaps, the one thing that renders “Session 9” distinct from the baroque symmetry of “The Shining” is its flat, digital look, as though it were shot partly on one of those pro-sumer cameras which it very well may have been. In some ways this only works to enhance the clanking claustrophobia of the dilapidated setting – which is a positive –, and also injects into the film the kind of verisimilitude that forces the atmosphere of dread to traverse the screen and cross over into our world, for the duration of the movie at least…also a positive. But rather than embracing the stark, stripped feel of the visuals so as to construct a certain mood – as is the case with “Primer”, “Pi” or “Following” – Anderson aims for some sort of psychological grandeur to which the film’s form simply cannot do justice, like a man stepping into a baby onesie or a baby adorning a labourer’s overalls. The low-fi look makes the film’s foray into psychotic expressionism seem like an amateurish stretch, as though it were made by students who desperately wished to prove their ambition, perhaps too soon. Alternatively, the unfulfilled narrative ambition on display might give the impression that the filmmakers either lack resources or lack the technical skill to realise their vision. The latter is much less likely seeing as the number of filmmakers capable of technical virtuosity seems to greatly outnumber those with the gifts required to elevate mere virtuosity to the level of notable art.
“Session 9” is considered by a considerable few to be one of the better if not one of the best horror films of the 2000s. Watching it, it is easy to glimpse the makings of a great film seeing as it bears elements of a certain Kubrick film that has been mentioned here ad nauseam, as well as hints of Carpenter’s “The Thing.” But it seems as though the things which could have made this film truly great are too closely tied to the reasons for its various failings. “Session 9” is like an isomeric mixture: the best parts are the worst parts and vice versa.
PS: Happy Halloween!
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The horror…: “Lizard in a Woman’s Skin”
October 26, 2014 § Leave a comment
It may not be as widely and religiously paraphrased as those two straitjacketing maxims ‘show, don’t tell’ and ‘write what you know’, but consume enough film criticism (both amateur and otherwise) and the act of cheating one’s audience will surely be decried and advised against in due time if not frequently. Of course, the idea of a filmmaker wilfully betraying the implicit trust of a film’s audience might initially appear mean and in poor faith, but if this is an absolute sin, how many passable, good or even great pictures could be considered successful simply on the back of unfair narrative practices? To use an obvious, almost blah example, could the untimely, almost cynical killing-off of Marion Crane in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” be called cheating? Much has been said about the general expectation – at that time in the history of cinema viewership – that Janet Leigh, being a recognisable name, a star, and the clear narrative and emotional focus of the first half hour of the film, would be expected to remain a significant narrative and emotional focus, or at least visually present, for the remainder of the film. Had she been portrayed by a no-name performer, Marion’s death would almost certainly not have been one quarter as scandalous as it turned out to be. And even with the knowledge that Janet Leigh was not quite the drawcard that an Audrey Hepburn or Elizabeth Taylor would have been in that role, she was a big enough screen presence such that it would have been perfectly reasonable for an audience member to expect, even subconsciously, that she should not suddenly cease to exist, or that if she did, that she do so with a little more dignity and glamour. It’s undeniable that Hitchcock predicted the impact that the sudden screeching death of a Hollywood star would have on an audience’s psychology, an audience who – by decades of perhaps inadvertent, perhaps calculated conditioning – had come to place their entire sense of security in that of their leading ladies and leading men. Hitchcock knew this, and he exploited it, and boy did it cause a stir. And while the seismic cultural shockwaves were not always received with positivity, “Psycho” was an overall sensation, not to mention it’s being an enduringly effective thriller; it was the Master of Suspense taking his habit of audience manipulation to its logical extreme.
Running wholeheartedly with the idea that narrative deceit, that is to say, manipulation which is not a result of a viewer simply failing to heed or notice ‘hints’ and ‘clues’ present in a film, is not an absolute no-no and can in fact be a desirable theatrical experience, giallo maestro Lucio Fulci crafted, with 1971’s “Lizard in a Woman’s Skin”, a film whose cinematic form seems to flirt fitfully with the psyche of its central character Carol Hammond, played by Audrey Tatou lookalike Florinda Bolkan. The result is a pleasantly giddy murder mystery with an ending whose expository clunk might annoy whilst, at the same time, a small area in the navel flutters from the knowledge that the film has been one devious, mendacious ride. Like most of the best giallos, this film, about a young woman from money and influence whose homicidal dream about a neighbour/debauched party girl manifests itself stab-for-stab in a real killing for which she categorically denies any responsibility, feels more like a thriller than a horror picture because of its at times consummate craftsmanship to the point of sleekness and its weirdly elegant mode of genre filmmaking. From the very first image, it is clear that this picture will not adopt the apparent observational neutrality of something directed by Rohmer, opting instead to drift in and out of fantasy, misperception and blatant falsehood. In fact, it’s possible that Fulci decides to not simply drift but to wholeheartedly fashion his cinematic language in such a way that it is entirely in service of one particular character’s selective memory, scheming, hopes and dreams, and very possibly their self-delusion and even psychosis. It’s a bold move; one which, as implied earlier, could, probably did and probably still does leave many viewers feeling violated and unsatisfied.
So is “Lizard in a Woman’s Skin” a horror picture and if so, from what exactly is the horror derived? In some ways it doesn’t quite adhere to modern concepts of horror cinema which feature either the traditional supernatural entities or humans that seem to be supernaturally malicious. By its end, this particular Lucio film deviates from most giallos by way of its very tight body count and sets itself apart from most horror films by the nature of its central crime, by the very fact that it has a central, inciting act as opposed to running on the palpable threat of an unpredictable series of acts. What may very well be presented as the fairly straightforward whodunit that it very well happens to be is dragged into the realm of horror by revelling in the mindscape of someone deeply fearful, deeply anxious and prone to terrible violence as a result of it, however momentary the violence. Not to compare it unduly to what many consider the quintessential modern horror film, but “Lizard in a Woman’s Skin” in a way prefigures the manner in which filmic language is used to suggest character psychology as being the predominant narrative perspective in “The Shining.” As is the case with that movie, one can only wonder how often – if ever – Lucio Fulci presents ‘objective’ reality in “Lizard in a Woman’s Skin”, that is to say, the kind of omniscient reality that audiences are privileged with when, for example, dramatic irony is being utilised. It seems that the horror in Fulci’s picture is not really the murder with which the film commences but Carol’s experience of it, her memories, her nightmare, her realisation, her self-deception. This being said, the film has a very shaggy quality about it as do most giallos what with its seedy, pulpy tone and the use of sometimes poorly synchronised dubbing of the kind common to Italian films from that period. In addition, some of the performances feel like one-take compromises and there is a distinctly tits-and-ass feel about it, which is probably not coincidental seeing as it was distributed by American International Pictures with its unabashed dedication to motion pictures with exploitative elements. This shagginess is perhaps the one element of the film which might allow a viewer to grudgingly accept, in hindsight – or realise in the moment – that the images and the sounds that Lucio presents are questionable in their trustworthiness. By the same token, it’s probably also the reason that the formal consideration applied by Fulci to “Lizard in a Woman’s Skin” might go unnoticed by the casual viewer or disregarded by the cinephile. Not that either Fulci or the film itself seem to two shits about it.
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“Gone Girl”: out of his sight and out of her mind
October 23, 2014 § Leave a comment
“Gone Girl”, to this mind at least, offers up a half dozen or so truths, confirmations or suggestions, however one chooses to see them. Mostly, though, it offers up a film that one might be afraid to heap plaudits upon lest repeat viewings prove it to be less than it initially seemed. But, for the current moment, let’s agree that this is one hell of a studio picture.
The news that Gillian Flynn’s blockbusting literary thriller had been optioned by some Hollywood movie factory and was bouncing around pre-production purgatory was already well known when these eyes first fixed gaze upon those fast-turning pages. On completion of the book, it felt evident that the act of translating this pop semi masterpiece from one medium to another would be an unstably tall order if not one destined to end up someplace between disaster and travesty. Even the eventual knowledge that the novelist and screenwriter were one and the same did little to abate whatever degree of trepidation existed. The fact that David Fincher would be at the creative helm did not either. With the shame of the wrongly sceptical unbeliever, it must thus be grudgingly acknowledged that Flynn, in distilling her own prose into an evidently well-oiled screenplay that makes for a damn slick picture, has clearly been paired with a director whose approach could not be more simpatico with her rhythm and tone as a writer, or at least the rhythm and tone of this particular novel of hers, the one after which the film in question takes its name. With “Gone Girl”, David Fincher, who over the last two decades has gained – whether consciously on his part or not – a reputation for being the polar opposite of loose and sloppy, remains the technically consummate filmmaker of near Kubrickian fastidiousness that both his devotees and decriers love to love and love to begrudge. Right from the montage of shots that open the film, establishing its sociogeographic context as GFC-era (presumably) Midwestern USA, namely Missouri, there is already a sense that a shrewd creative intelligence is at work, both behind the camera and in a diegetic sense. Sure, the techno-grunge leaning that seems to come through in many of Fincher’s touchstone pictures, so aggressive yet so sleek, is not necessarily employed in this his most recent work. The overall hue of the visuals is fairly neutral as opposed to icy or acidic, and the manner in which the never flatfooted camera moves is functional, daresay modest. As for the shot compositions, they are relatively straightforward, crisp and seemingly free of anything even nearing excessive subtext or visual thematics. All in all, there is something calculatedly, stylishly everyday about the way Fincher and cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth choose to visualise the morbid soul of suburbia and heteronormative small town America, and with this choice the director proves – if he hasn’t already – that he is as beholden to his material as he is to his craft. More crucially though, had he not done so prior to this point – particularly with his perhaps over-lauded “The Social Network” – Fincher’s expository efficiency highlights the possibility that he may in fact be Hollywood’s prime teller of motion picture stories, despite his being known for style and atmospherics. Even with regards to the aforementioned 2010 Sorkin-scripted picture, the sense of it being a touch slight, of it being too much of a psychologically reductive summary, is inseparably tied to the unprecedented narrative precision for which it was understandably [over]praised. While other studio-based filmmakers may be unmatched in their iconoclasm or psycho-emotional power, Fincher may be the only of his industry contemporaries capable of adapting Gillian Flynn’s novel to the screen while retaining and placing front and centre the narrative puppetry responsible for the source material’s very potency. Money could be bet and won on the assertion that a filmmaker like Wes Anderson, Tarantino or the Coens would have fashioned a film with a personal vision stronger than that displayed in Fincher’s version, but the art in ‘Gone Girl’ is in its ability to manipulate the machinery of plot and story, and while Quentin and the Coens are themselves masters of fucking with time and audience expectations, their noticeable idiosyncrasies would have muddied the waters to detrimental effect in a way that Fincher’s invested but dispassionate approach does not. This leads to the next fact/confirmation. This film’s employment of voice-over debunks – as do some many films throughout cinema’s thus far short history – the rote declarations of followers of Syd Field and other self-proclaimed screenwriting aficionados who state that the technique is the refuge of the lazy wordsmith, lazy like Wilder at his best, Kaufmann, Kubrick, Godard, Malick, Truffaut, Schrader…and many other lazy, lazy idlers. What makes “Gone Girl” noteworthy is not just the persistent appearance of voice-over but the boldly matter-of-fact presence of Amy Dunne’s questionable stories and insinuations. So strong is Amy’s presence as an unreliable narrator in the novel that something would have been lost – perhaps everything – if Flynn did not retain this particular device in her screenplay in some shape or form, voice-over being her choice, and had it not been so effectively married to the visuals in the editing suite. It might not be chillingly earnest like Travis Bickle’s similar diary narration in “Taxi Driver” or bear the novelty of being from beyond the grave and thus fittingly, fatalistically omniscient like Joe Gillis’ narration in “Sunset Boulevard”, but if there is a screw loose in Fincher’s hyper-efficient picture, it’s not this. One sequence in particular displays the pure artistic balls the “Gone Girl” camp possesses. It is a prolonged stretch of pure exposition so exhilarating in its construction that it may very well wind the viewer simply because of its sheer commitment to filmmaking that may be considered counterintuitive and against ‘better judgement’. The sequence’s effectiveness is almost due precisely to the fact that it openly defies a film culture which stresses the avoidance of plainly provided narrative information, not only quite possibly committing a cinematic crime, but quite possibly getting away with it so deftly that one cannot help but be impressed. That being said, said sequence bears close similarities to others found in earlier Fincher efforts, namely “Fight Club”, so it seems that the director is simply putting to effective use one of his personal trade tricks.
Then there is Ben Affleck whose being cast as Nick Dunne is a bit – to quote Kim Dickens’ Detective Rhonda Boney – ‘meta’ and whose performance is emblematic of a key element of the film’s success. Firstly, Affleck’s casting feels a touch knowing, if one considers his public persona as compared to buddy and co-Oscar-winner Matt Damon who, with his polite, socially responsible demeanour and his self-deprecating turns on shows like “Entourage” and “30 Rock” is kind of the widely-loved ‘good guy’ that Nick Dunne (and Ben Affleck as Nick Dunne) struggles to be and would benefit from being. Similarly, Affleck as a public figure has never quite seemed to receive the courteously warm reception that Damon seems to enjoy, which is not to say that he (Affleck) strikes people initially as a ‘douchebag’ in the way that Bradley Cooper might, but that it is only as a respected director that Ben Affleck’s star has risen again somewhat, though as an actor he still doesn’t inspire much of a wave of goodwill and presumptuous affection. Maybe there’s an element of glibness about him; almost as though he doesn’t do quite enough to earn his A-list status, which isn’t true. Whatever the reason, news of his casting in this film certainly failed to excite yours truly, yours truly must admit. However, the prudently loose-limbed performance that Affleck brings to the screen in “Gone Girl” counteracts and in doing so complements director Fincher’s coolly disciplined mise-en-scene, dispelling the whiff of anti-charisma that may have unfairly hung about the actor and mirroring the way in which his character in this film reinvents himself, or at least his public persona, to some extent. It’s not a bravura piece of acting necessarily, but the everyman ‘humanity’ (read: underwhelming ordinariness and resultant sense of disappointment) he manages to inject into so tight a narrative machine which in turn helps make this silver screen iteration both thrilling and affecting must be credited to him as well as his co-stars, particularly Carrie Coon whose role as Margo Dunne – though not as involved in the movie as in the book – is quite frankly vital, and Dickens as Boney, whose integrity and clearly strong values are only just kept in check by studied professionalism, not to mention Tyler Perry’s spot-on portrayal of (fictional) celebrity attorney Tanner Bolt. Which brings us to Rosamund Pike and the most thought-provoking quandary that bubbles to the mind’s surface once the credits have rolled on “Gone Girl.”
Rosamund Pike’s turn as Amy Dunne may be considered – on the one hand – perfect, or it may be appraised as being terribly misguided on the parts of the actor and her director. The difficulty in determining which is the more accurate assessment is probably due to the fact that both iterations of “Gone Girl” may be viewed – perhaps even simultaneously – as (a) a work of realism narrated by a fanciful and quite possibly psychotic individual (psychotic in the clinical sense, not the generally misunderstood sense), (b) a satirical social commentary of sorts – or at the very least a dark comedy – whose outright garishness and absurdity ratchets upwards as the narrative progresses, with melodramatic intent, or (c) a largely literary exercise in which the medium becomes aware of itself i.e. the story of Nick and Amy Dunne, the two married writers, morphing into or revealing itself to be a story about writing, narrative and character. From the first moment Rosamund Pike appears on-screen as Amy Dunne, she has a calculated look about her, something self-consciously performative in the way that she carries herself. This sense is not eased by the very knowing voice-over narration Amy provides, which seems to carry through diegetically as she interacts with Nick and the people around her, the manner of her speech that is, not the voice-over. David Fincher’s pictures admittedly tend not to contain deeply naturalistic, mumbly performances. Rather, there always seems to be just a hint of theatricality, almost as if to remind viewers that they are not partaking of a slice of reality but a slice of a cinematic interpretation of reality. So, while the acting in “Gone Girl” is very much director appropriate, Pike’s is slightly more heightened; her speech and behaviour slightly more mannered. It could be that Amy as a person is simply like this. She is the daughter of two writers who created a series of children’s books about an exceptional, multi-talented girl called Amy whose real-life counterpart could not help but compete with, or at least try to. It’s not too difficult to imagine how this would mindfuck any child into personality disorder territory, and there is a strong implication that Amy at some point ceased seeing herself as anything other than a character and her life a narrative. Now, whether this would twist someone to the point that they, after years of matrimonial disappointment (to put it lightly), would conspire to do what Amy ultimately does is hard to know for sure. But considering that the human brain is itself a largely misunderstood, twisted mass of neuronal jelly, it probably is capable of anything as long as anything adheres to the laws of physics; so in this sense Amy Dunne’s actions are not wholly implausible. The thing about Rosamund Pike’s performance is this: was portraying Amy as an icy, outwardly crafty braniac uptown mannequin who is supremely aware of her actions a superior creative choice to – say – playing Amy as a victim of her own psychological hang-ups, which is to say on a plane of realism more in-keeping with most of the other characters in the film? Well, the more one thinks about the overall feel of the film, where it begins and where it ends up, Pike as Amy Dunne is the one consistent element, the one thing that would work to convince audiences that the insanity which eventuates is not out of the blue; she is the foreshadowing of darkness at the film’s outset and the promise of darkness to come as the movie closes out with a shot of her ‘crazy’, rested head.
But before the word ‘crazy’ is bandied about any further in reference to the character of Amy, perhaps the wrath she feels towards Nick is somewhat justified. Well, maybe not the way it manifests but the feeling in itself. The rage that is evident in both the novel and the film is one that seems to be directed at complacency; the complacency of a culture in which it is perfectly fine to douse oneself in cologne and fine-tune one’s storytelling skills prior to a hot date while it is equally acceptable to smell like sweat while lazing about at home after having convinced aforementioned hot date that you’re…extraordinary. It seems as though Gillian Flynn, in writing the novel and scripting the film, has found a way to explore how important or at least how pervasive narrative and character are in ‘everyday’ life and especially in relationships; how even the dullest marital union is a creation of sorts and how, as a result, it is everybody’s responsibility to maintain the image, to keep the plot rolling along and prevent the storyline from stagnating. Maybe it’s a total coincidence on Flynn’s part that Amy and Nick are both writers, and that their initial meeting and flirtation involves them flexing their wit, assessing each other’s smarts and revelling in their presumed perceptive abilities, but what better way to dramatise the narrative of a relationship that to have both parties be writers, and laid off ones at that? If Amy’s diary entries are to be trusted in the slightest, one would have to admit that the trajectory of their courtship and eventual engagement is very written; the kind of story many people would love to script for themselves, complete with a cloud of frosting sugar in a dark alleyway as the setting for the classic first kiss. If Amy’s memory of this event, and their romance in general, were to be confirmed by an objective, omniscient entity, it would have to be said that both Nick and Amy were very aware of the story of their romance. To side with Amy, if Nick has it in him to dazzle her, why is it that when they pack their bags and move to Missouri he goes from being “Tender is the Night” to TV guide, especially considering how much of an effort she apparently makes to remain ‘literary?’ It’s enough to make anyone do what Amy ends up doing, right? The point in saying this is that David Fincher, on the basis of the film he has directed, on account of his opting to have Amy reach into the audience and attempt to wrench clumps of sympathy from viewers hearts by way of her very direct narration and her knowing presence, may very well be siding with Amy, not that he has anything against Ben/Nick, but that Amy’s grand plot, deranged as it may be, has more than a lick of honesty about it. Plus, Fincher has long been known to entertain the plights of the sick and the perverted (the media machine included, though an analysis of “Gone Girl”s take on the politics of press and public image should be sought elsewhere), like a psychiatrist who is comfortable delving deep into dangerously complex minds because they have the thick, safe rope of professionalism and clinical judgement tied tightly around their waist. They have their medicine; Fincher has his cinema.
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Brief impression: “Modern Romance”
October 16, 2014 § 1 Comment
Albert Brooks’ 1981 directorial effort might appear to be, on first viewing, about a man called Robert who can’t seem to make up his damn mind about a woman called Mary: about whether he wants to keep seeing her or whether he thinks they are just too damn incompatible to keep seeing each other. But on further analysis, that is to say ten to fifteen minutes spent thinking about the movie two to three days after having seen it for the first time, it becomes clear that Robert, embodied by writer-director Brooks, is in two minds from the very get-go, and that each one is pretty well made up, the only problem being that they are in stark opposition. In fact, the very foundation for much of the comedy in this film is Robert’s rapid oscillations between these two minds, or rather, the multiple minds he seems to be in with regards to most things in life. So fleetingly does he flit from one to the other, they might as well be simultaneous, which is precisely the crux of his state of crisis. Within single statements, single sentences, Robert repeatedly, dizzyingly contradicts and undercuts himself with an almost confessional naturalism on the part of Brooks, and the character portrait that results is one not of an individual who can’t make a decision per se, but one who can’t choose which decision to stick with, because if there’s one thing that Robert can do it’s to have an opinion or a take or multiple takes on something. It may very well be that having two contradictory minds shields him from having to pick a side and own up to any one decision, which is to say that Robert is highly insecure. This is precisely what makes him such a captivating on-screen presence, his contradictory nature that is, not necessarily his insecurity. In addition to Brooks’ expressively non-expressive face – and a pleasant one at that – the character of Robert doesn’t come across as hand-wringing and ineffectual but rather as very actively rash and self-absorbed. Unfortunately, when it comes to choosing someone to love, it may be somewhat possible to simultaneously want and not want a person, but it’s probably a little harder to have them and not have them. At some point a choice is required.
What truly makes “Modern Romance” uniquely captivating, though, is that Mary – while not as obviously neurotic and excruciatingly needy as Robert – is deeply complicit in their yo-yoing pendulum of a love affair, perhaps because she is helplessly drawn to him, or perhaps because she is just as helplessly confused and in two minds as he is. Which leads directly to a key question, the question being: is ‘Modern Romance’ mostly a film about a man and his peculiar assortment of insecurities, is it about a couple and their inherent attraction to each other despite how terrible they might very well be for one another, or – as the title would suggest – is it a film about sex, love and commitment in (at the time) contemporary USA, the key word being ‘contemporary’? The truth is that Brooks’ picture is a bit of all three, but maybe in varying doses at different points along its runtime. On the strength of Robert’s pungency and nervy charisma as the film’s key protagonist and the fact that a viewer simply cannot escape his mindscape due to the fact that the film seems to continually adopt or at least imply his point-of-view and state of mind, ‘Modern Romance’ is something of a character study, though not a particularly incisive one. If the aim of a character study is to analyse and understand the inner workings of a character, the film is not emphatically successful as one if at all. Yet the insistence on Robert’s repetitive, one-note mode of thought and his apparent lack of insight is a clear move to exploit his neuroticism for comedic effect, which implies that the objective is not necessarily to understand why he is the way he is, but how the way he is influences the choices he make, in particular those pertaining to romance. Then there is the idea of the film being a kind of peek into the romantic life of a heterosexual couple in 1980s LA. Whether or not one considers Mary and Robert as being representative of an average mid to upper-middle class white couple on an archetypal level, or as being a couple representative only of themselves and as real as any that one would meet at a party or people-watch in a park, ‘Modern Romance’ is probably digested most easily as a love story with acerbic undertones: boy dumps girl, boy fears he has made a terrible mistake, boy bulldozes his way back into girl’s life. In this mode, it is a terrific piece of entertainment with a unique enough bent to ensure that audiences inundated with one lacklustre romantic tale after another will find themselves a little shook up.
Then there is the third approach one can take with this film, which is to view it as part of a wider movement in post-50s cinema which couldn’t help but obsess over the existential crisis facing ‘modernised’ mankind, at least in the West. As was the case with European films of the late fifties and sixties that examined the psychic pain individuals are burdened with when a society adopts new mores and values without necessarily retiring older, perhaps even contradictory modes of living and thinking, a handful of pictures from the New Hollywood era similarly dealt with the relative failure of the counterculture as not just a movement but as a wider cultural sea change; not simply its inability to completely debunk and replace traditional values that it considered oppressive and non-progressive, but the way in which even those who whole-heartedly embraced “free love” and the like were unable to successfully put these values into practice without drowning in angst and jealousy. This of course makes ‘Modern Romance’ sound a great deal headier that it actually is when the truth is that it is more in keeping with the works of Paul Mazursky al-a ‘ Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,’ which is not to suggest that either film is exactly fluff.
What happens when a society decides to offer a greater degree of choice to the individual, a society which has up to that point dictated the ways in which men and women are to ordinarily relate with one another, how love and sex are to operate, and how permanent ‘permanent’ is? Where a man was once expected to find a decent woman to call his wife – and vice versa, get married, procreate and stick with her till he or she died, modernity arrived along with the slogan that ‘God is dead’ and the assertion that each individual is a sovereign, sentient entity with the right to choose and the responsibility for their own fate. For many, this is a liberating idea which it very well should be, on paper at least, but for just as many – perhaps the very same many – this new approach brings with it a burden that sees many of these many retreating, ironically, to the comfort of prescribed thoughts and lifestyles (not to say that the counterculture itself wasn’t highly prescribed, though the drugs certainly weren’t.) Why exactly Robert Cole is so insecure – as mentioned already – doesn’t appear to be the central concern of ‘Modern Romance,’ but rather, how being granted – by modern Western society – the relative freedom to choose what shape and form his love life will take causes him more pain than it does pleasure. For someone as insecure as Robert, and for that matter Mary, there is perhaps nothing as confusing and terrifying as feeling the need to commit (whether as a result of traditional inculcation, fear of loneliness or personal belief) whilst being offered the choice of being utterly non-committal in favour of ‘free love’ (which one might opt for due to indiscipline, fear of commitment, sex addiction or personal belief.) Maybe in an earlier time or in a different culture more suspicious or less tolerant of transitory romantic practices, Robert would simply be forced to marry Mary, stay married and become quietly resentful. Does ‘Modern Romance’ seem to be suggesting that some modern folk just aren’t modern enough to pursue sex and romance without guilt and/or the feeling that love isn’t real until drawn up and signed, but not traditional enough to make it last in a traditional sense? Whatever it’s suggesting, it obviously finds it funny; painfully funny.
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Brief impression: “황해” aka “Hwang hae” or “The Yellow Sea”
October 9, 2014 § Leave a comment
For someone increasingly stumped by the improbability of seeing a rushing stream of brilliant films of widely varied styles coming out of a particular country, “The Yellow Sea” comes as a very sobering reaffirmation of the likelihood that every river can in fact run dry or that every river at least has a bank, not least for the fact that this film is considered a legitimate example of the general excellence of South Korean ‘art’ or ‘auteur’ cinema, especially of the successful fusion of mainstream and arthouse sensibilities that seems to be a hallmark of sorts of the best that that national cinema has to offer. In fact, Thierry Fremaux, when announcing the inclusion of “The Yellow Sea” in the Un Certain Regard slate of the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, called it a ‘beautiful film.’ But the most egregious part of Fremaux’s proclamation is not the fact that Na Hong-Jin’s follow-up to his very fine debut “The Chaser” is not categorically beautiful, but that the Cannes festival director felt it necessary to highlight the film’s beauty, whether visual or otherwise, in light of an official selection that featured films like “The Tree of Life”, “House of Tolerance”, “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia”, “Oslo, 31 August” and “The Kid with a Bike” to name a few – even “Melancholia” and “Drive” – all of these films whose own particular brands of beauty will be remembered long after “The Yellow Sea” is all but forgotten; modern-day masterpieces to be sure, far more exquisitely photographed and deeply assured in their artistry. Of course, the fact that he made special mention of the film in question is not necessarily proof that he holds it in any higher esteem than its festival contemporaries, but it is a striking assessment if only for the fact that “The Yellow Sea,” which starts not terribly, becomes progressively and alarmingly more mediocre as its runtime clocks along.
For anyone familiar with “The Chaser,” seeing the establishing five or ten minutes of its successor makes it clear that Na Hong-Jin is deviating from the somewhat clean, relatively steady approach he adopted with his first picture, a crime thriller/chase picture – like “The Yellow Sea” – about a pimp who realises that he may have uncovered the identity of a serial killer. The critical success of that first film – not to mention the way it ran away with the local box-office – may be due in part to Hong-Jin’s display of his ability to expertly combine the perversely offbeat sensibility that seems to dominate Korean art-house cinema with a less opaque approach to narrative and mood, not dissimilar to the mainstream-art-house balance that countryman Bong Joon-Ho achieves with utter mastery, only, “The Chaser” swings just a touch closer to the mainstream or at least does so more frequently, which is not a bad thing. The point is, where that film managed to be narratively and formally straightforward while retaining a level of unhealthy fascination with its already morbid subject matter, this new movie is not at all a nice, even mixture, like whole blood as it exists in arteries and veins, but a spun-down product with cells at the bottom and plasma floating on top after it’s been centrifuged. Of course, plasma and red blood cells are utilised individually as transfusible products, but for whole blood to be of functional value, the various components need to blend into a cohesive whole, which is sadly not the case with ‘The Yellow Sea’ (the blood analogy is apt seeing as there is so much of it splattered all over this picture.)
Perhaps it was a very conscious desire on the filmmaker’s part to create a more visceral aesthetic with his second picture, the kind that nauseates and oppresses in service of a specific overall effect. Despite “The Chaser’s” horrific content, there is a certain ‘fictional’ sheen to the visuals that would allow for a viewer to easily distance oneself, at least on a deeply emotional level. It’s very much a movie, “The Chaser.” As for “The Yellow Sea,” right from the get-go there is an acid yellow hue to the shadowy, high contrast images which are themselves shot handheld, shaking ever so slightly all the time, hovering right within characters’ personal space, perhaps in hope of baring a bit of their souls or documenting every telling wave of emotion that passes across their faces. It’s the kind of overbearing grungy “realism” that won’t rest until the viewer realises how goddam dire things are for the protagonist, the protagonist in this case being Gu-nam (played by Ha Jung-woo), a Joseonjok, or ethnic Korean living in China, and one not living very well at that, struggling to meet his growing gambling debts as a taxi driver while his wife, who has travelled to South Korean for work and has apparently forgotten him, continues to not make contact, which in turn convinces Gu-nam that she is being unfaithful to him. Luckily, Gu-nam finds himself hired to travel to Seoul in order to carry out a contract kill for a fellow Joseonjok gangster, in exchange for a decent sum of money (and the chance for Gu-nam to hunt down his wife and her presumed lover.) Now, a brilliant director like Andrea Arnold who also adopts this kind of dirty realism aesthetic and almost obnoxiously so – which is why her films can have a polarising effect – does it with commitment, and with a certain discipline. She also doesn’t pepper her rough-hewn, tough-minded films with incongruous elements like washed-out fantasised/remembered sex sequences. Why not? Because this would render her realist aesthetic disingenuous, unless she thought deep and hard about the inclusion of the aforementioned sex scenes and developed an approach which would effectively facilitate their inclusion in the final cut of the film. Hong-Jin does the former, peppering “The Yellow Sea” with images that are presumably meant to represent Gu-nam’s painful romantic nostalgia/murderous melancholy, but the director simply slips this kind of expressionistic element into a film which is not only arthouse-shaky, but will quickly become mainstream Hollywood action-shaky, without any evident awareness of the aesthetic incongruence at play. It becomes a Tony Scott film, but whereas a picture by the late director and brother of Ridley (whose greatest personal achievement – Tony’s that is – may be his executive producer role in “The Good Wife”) would whole-heartedly adopt the hyperkinetic approach, “The Yellow Sea,” or rather Hong-Jin, seems attracted to the idea of being both down, dirty and quiet and sleek, fast and loud. Hell, there’s no reason why these two aesthetics can’t somehow find a way to tango: case in point, Johnnie To’s marvellous 2013 crime flick “Drug War.” And let’s not forget Jacques Audiard’s even more brilliant “The Beat that my Heart Skipped” from a few years back. These films know how to scrap with agility and some sort of grace.
So as not to imply that ‘The Yellow Sea’ is a failure from beginning to end, the chapter of the film – yes, it is broken up into a few chapters – that depicts Gu-nam’s attempt at killing the Korean businessman he has been contracted to whack, is evidence that Na Hong-Jin has a decent store of directorial talent and that Ha Jung-woo is one hell of a performer. Spanning roughly twenty, thirty minutes, this narrative block displays mordant humour and observational patience in both the shooting and the editing, allowing Ha Jung-woo to expertly embody a man submerged in a bog of desperation and survivalist amorality. It shows in his hesitancy, but also in his jumpy, bird-like persistence. This period marks the movie’s high point but also its descent – almost without warning – into a depressingly rote gangland thriller complete with frequent, overly-terse phone calls servicing half-baked exposition, wildly photographed scenes of violent mayhem which would have been far more horrifying if approached with some restraint, and car chases cut together so frantically yet so half-heartedly that they begin to feel artless. And to top it all off? Silly little art-house flourishes every so often. At the end, what is left is a glass of unshaken orange juice which, when consumed, is at one point unsubstantially thin and at another, an unpleasant mouthful of pulp. How disappointing.
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St. Sasha of the Night – Part Two
September 30, 2014 § Leave a comment
Tuesday night
Sasha Bunmi-Watkins tips his head to the concierge’s desk as he crosses Acacia Grande Central’s modest lobby in the direction of the lifts. Unless he’s fabricating things, the young man behind the counter with his face buried in something, who doesn’t seem to care that someone has just entered the building at the very dead of night, is the same young man who checked him in a few days ago in a way quite unbefitting someone in the hospitality trade; whose nametag identified and still identifies him as Lachlan with no apparent last name.
The boy – a description Lachlan does not satisfy in body but may very well do in mind and in manner – surprises Sasha by looking up from whatever very important thing he’s been looking at and following the Bristolian’s journey across the barren foyer with a very blah gaze. Sasha knows this because he catches Lachlan’s blah eyes while waiting a good two minutes for one of the lifts – any of the lifts – to arrive. He initially repays the look with one of equal dispassion, but then, almost of its own accord, his face cracks out a drab smile and his head nods “evening/how’s it going?” Lachlan simply goes back to whatever it is he’s doing and in a moment or two the lift doors chime open. Sasha supposes that this is what he gets for travelling cheap and boarding even more cheaply: rude lookaways and dispassionate stares that follow you from behind like you’re a most uninteresting oddity.
Once again Sasha makes it to his room on floor six without any visual reassurance that he is not in fact this hotel’s sole guest. Of course he occasionally hears shuffling and chatting in the hallway when he is emerging from the whooshing gush of the bathroom after a poo or when he is bent over the minibar taking stock of what’s inside, but how coincidental must it be that the seen and the heard are so consistently – almost deliberately – dissociated?
On letting himself into his room, Sasha experiences the brief glow of contentment that tends to hit him when he finds the slight mess he left behind in the morning replaced by a turned-down bed and three-and-a-half star cleanliness. In a show of appreciation for whoever’s hard work, Sasha lobs his shoes aside and takes a quick peek at the selection of booze in the little stump of a fridge. He picks one out, one that is named after either a grouse or a turkey, and unscrews the cap and, drinking from it, thinks back on how, within ten minutes of Cal Marvale having departed Oddknots in a silver taxi, he had already decided to abandon the Kirin bottle and split, telling himself that if this was some sort of metaphysical slap in the face of his Aussie acquaintance, then so be it. When he was fairly confident that Cal was well on his way to Dee Why or wherever else he routinely laid his head in the blasted city, Sasha walked outside and hailed a ride. It wasn’t so much that he’d lost his nerve or that he couldn’t bring himself to engage a complete stranger in some sort of exchange of words, as if he was so irreparably shy that he lost fewer calories running laps than he did talking small. Oddknots just wasn’t the place, maybe not tonight, maybe not ever. He would find a joint with better energy and there he would finally enjoy himself and expend what was left of his quickly dwindling youth.
Looking and smelling much the same as he has this last hour, apart from the leather jacket, scarf and reapplication of cologne, Sasha crosses the lobby, this time in the direction of the street, only to double back and startle Lachlan with an abrupt request.
“Were you after a place for dinner?” Lachlan replies, in a monotone.
“I’m after an exciting place to have a drink and run into strangers.”
There is no reply.
“See, I’ve already had my dinner. Now I’m looking for a place to — I suppose I’m looking to have a good time,” Sasha clarifies.
Lachlan inhales as though preparing for a six month sabbatical underwater.
“Well…there’s a couple of bars along this street, so you could try one of those…”
“You’d recommend them, these bars?”
“I don’t know about recommend, but I’d say they’re worth a try.” The poor boy doesn’t know what the fuck’s going on.
“Yes, but which would you suggest?”
“I don’t — I haven’t really been to any of the ones around here much, so I’m not sure if I could legitimately vouch for any, like, with any authority. Which is the problem.”
“Well, I’m not a local, as you can probably tell, so I’m curious to know where locals go. For the sake of curiosity.”
“Yeah, I get it, I mean — I suppose you could look up some bars on Time Out Sydney, you know…the website, or Urbanspoon maybe. Or you could just head to the city and have a walk around.”
“I see. Time Out. Are you a local?”
Lachlan smiles and redistributes the weight on his feet momentarily, wondering – one would assume – what the hell this is. “Basically,” he says.
“I’m in good hands then.”
“Do you have a smartphone?”
“I have my Galaxy on me, yes.”
“Time Out Sydney’s better than most locals, trust me, and I think the app’s just as good, and free.”
“I see.”
It really does feel like the dead of night at this desk, in this lobby, in this hotel.
“Or you could just check out some of the bars around here like I was saying. There’s a few places up and down the road that seem to get a fair bit of action. I mean, they seem pretty popular from what I can tell; big crowds, open till early, cheap drinks. Probably wouldn’t be the worst start.”
“No. But what would you say is the best place you’ve been to in the last month? ”
Lachlan looks right into Sasha’s face as he presumably thinks of an answer. It would be disconcerting if his face wasn’t so bland.
“I really like this place in the Rocks called Oddknots,” he sighs like a beach ball losing all its air in a rush. “It’s more of a pub and it’s got a really chilled out vibe; it’s not really where you go to – like – get down, but I’d definitely recommend it. It’s just a really cool place. But seriously, you should get onto Time Out.”
“Time Out.”
Lachlan smiles as though there’s a finger up his ass and goes back to his business. He has officially left the conversation.
*
“Enjoy yourself and they’ll enjoy you,” Rams Marques, ladies’ man and second-year dropout, would often say as he led a crew of college boys out into the city back in their UCL days, and in adherence to this mantra, Sasha currently adopts – without being totally cognizant of the process – an affected look of relaxed confidence that manifests as a constant mellow smirk and an almost sleepy gaze. If smiling induces happiness in the smiler, surely this will displace his baseline unease and replace it with something more socially workable.
He is perfectly aware that this particular demeanour, if executed poorly, will make him appear either high or a bit special, and considering he has been nursing a rum and coke for the last twenty minutes without arousing even the mildest look of interest, Sasha wonders if he may need to revise his face.
For example, those two fetching lasses further along the bar, one of whom is chatting with that pale haired young history-student type, entered Bloom Bar not more than five minutes ago and he’d had them in his sights from the get-go. They saw him looking at them, this he knows, but they elected to sit beside this individual. Perhaps it is because he had his back to them and was thus less imposing, or less creepy. Whatever their reasons, he is certain that one of these must pertain to the fact that his mug is not as inviting as he intends it to be. So he drops it, the put-on look he is wearing, and just about halves the rum-coke mixture at his front in one foul gulp.
There is something comforting about the clattering of pool balls. Perhaps it’s because there’s always something to watch when a pool table is present, or at the very least something to do or consider doing in-between rejections or while avoiding them. Sasha swivels on his ass and leans his back against the bar, and proceeds to watch a young man sizing up the cue ball, the dusted end of the cue itself sliding back and forth like a hesitant phallus between the two fingers he’s planted firmly on the green felt. In a flash and with a crack, a solid snaps into a corner hole and can be heard rumbling through the table’s guts. The player meanwhile pulls the cue to himself like a Marine would their bayonet, no discernible joy or elation on his face but a great pride implicit in the way he plods alongside the table, surveying the field. Sasha notices that the furthermost table is unoccupied though it is surrounded by standing drinkers.
“Hey, care for a game of pool?”
Sasha has, without even a glance in their direction or a quick bit of personal pep-talk, sidled up to one of the two girls whose eyes he had hoped to catch on their entering the bar and has spoken these words to her, to which she responds by glancing briefly at her blonder companion, now in waning conversation with the art-school boy.
“Okay,” she says.
Sasha is a little floored by the unqualified acceptance but is not quite sure why. He extends a regrettably limp hand and says, “I’m Sasha, by the way.”
“Goia,” she says, pronouncing it Joya.
The blonder one introduces herself as Mel, with shocking cordiality, and to conclude the handshakes, Sasha clasps palms with Bruno who will insist on calling him ‘bro’ henceforth.
“Nice to meet you, Bruno.” The handshake lingers.
Having led the three across the room to the far table, fed the necessary number of coins into the table and set up the balls inside the triangle, Sasha offers Goia the honour to break, but she shirks on account of her being ‘too shit at it’ though Sasha strangely responds to this, on a level inaccessible to his cognizance even, as some sort of sexual rebuffing. Curdling a little on the inside but not knowing why, he holds out the cue to Mel, who takes it and explodes the rack like a pro, sinking a stripe in the process.
“Boys versus girls?” says Bruno.
Mel downs two stripes in a row and is circling the table, her long, overly straight hair swaying and parting gently against her bare shoulders.
“How about Mel versus everyone else?” says Goia.
“Yeah…fuck, she’s good,” Bruno concedes as booze rolls from his mouth back into his throat. “You hear that, Mel? You’re not terrible.”
“Do you play much?” Sasha asks Mel as she is leaned over, prepping a shot which she ultimately misses, for which she partly blames him, unbeknownst to him.
“I like playing,” Mel shrugs as she hands the cue to Bruno, “but I don’t seek it out, like, I don’t look for it. My dad had a table when I was growing up so we played all the time.” She ends with a shrug.
They watch Bruno nudge a solid towards a hole without really placing it in a position of any advantage.
“So you’re from Sydney?” Sasha continues, mirroring Mel’s stance somehow.
“Why do you say that?” she says in a tone that may or may not be drily cheeky.
“Just curious.”
“No. And you?”
“UK.”
“You don’t sound super British. No offence.”
“No, it’s okay; I accept that I’m mediocre.”
She gives him an odd look as Goia waves the tip of the cue in his face, somewhat absent-mindedly.
“Mediocre?” Mel says.
Sasha takes the cue from Goia. “Mediocre, as opposed to super?”
“A-ha.” She’s not convinced.
“But, if you must know my mother gave birth to me in Lagos, so I suppose that’s why I don’t sound like the queen.”
Mel nods her head and makes a face that would be saying ‘that’s pretty cool’ if it wasn’t really saying ‘not sure what to do with this conversation now that it’s flatter than flat Fanta.’
Sasha takes a shot and nicks the ball that Bruno has already pushed a few inches closer to the hole. He fucks it up, groans to himself, hands the cue to Mel and joins his drink at a table by the wall. Goia and Bruno seem to be sharing a joke. Sasha takes a meek swig.
Gioa approaches Mel, who is scanning the scene on the table. They exchange half a word, it seems, and Goia is off, trotting to the bar.
“Where’s she going?” Sasha says to Bruno.
“To get more drinks.”
“I wonder if we should be doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“Getting drinks.”
“You think we should be getting drinks for her?”
Sasha looks at Bruno and his shoulder length hair and stubbled upper lip. “For them.”
“Mate, women can buy their own drinks in Sydney,” Bruno says before he grins.
“Are they allowed to orgasm too?” says Sasha, who can’t believe he’s just said what he’s said.
Bruno rasps with laughter and describes Sasha’s line as ‘fucking amazing.’ They then watch Mel sink another ball with a deft angle shot.
“You backpacking, bro?” says Bruno.
“Why would I be backpacking?” Sasha responds, not quite sure whether to be offended yet, or even at all.
“This is, like, kind of a backpacker joint, in case you didn’t kind of pick up on it.”
“Are you a backpacker?”
“I wouldn’t mind fucking a backpacker,” Bruno says, grinning on the inside.
“Then I take it you’re from here, or at least not a backpacker.”
“Bronte, bra. You been to Bronte?”
“I think I‘ve heard of it. So you’re here to pick up backpackers?”
Bruno laughs “Bro. Absolutely. Don’t fucking tell anyone.”
Goia returns to Mel’s side with what Sasha guesses to be two caprioscas, pinkish in short glasses.
Sasha leans in to Bruno while looking at the two young women. “Are they backpackers?”
“I don’t think so. But I think they might be staying where backpackers stay. Which pretty much makes them backpackers. If you get my meaning.”
Mel’s run of luck ends. She passes Bruno the cue and he accepts it and confronts the table with a swagger that belies his clear lack of talent, leaving Sasha on his own with the two women. They’re having a quiet exchange and nipping at their drinks, looking as though they’ve already left the venue in spirit.
Sasha becomes abruptly conscious of his current predicament, which may very well exist solely within the confines of his own mind. Standing where he is, holding his drink as he is doing without even the slightest air of self-comfort, Sasha could either appear to his two female companions – as well as to whoever in this bar is watching and judging – like a tagalong, hovering, hoping to get an in, but hopelessly so. Conversely, and noticeable only to Goia and Mel and perhaps the more perceptive of people watchers, he could appear unduly aloof, trying to imply to these women that he is unaffected by their impression of him, whatever that may be, and that he does not feel in the least bit excluded by their secret girl talk, a stance which would not in any way increase his appeal in their eyes despite what certain schools of male sexual thought would have him believe.
“Can I get you guys a drink?”
Goia and Mel look at Sasha, their brand spanking new cocktails inches from their lips.
“We just started on these,” Mel says.
“Oh, okay,” says Sasha, knowing full well that there was no logic in his move. “But I’m getting your next drinks though, so don’t forget.”
They both smile and watch him approach Bruno, who is still considering his shot choices, none of which would be particularly easy for anyone below the level of an amateur shark. The two men exchange words and Sasha is off to the bar.
*
Sasha hands Bruno his third house beer. The game of pool has been over for a good hour and up to this point the four have barely gotten any real juice on each other. Bruno (surprise, surprise!) is a student, but of surveying, contrary to Sasha’s assumption that it would be of history. He’s in his second year, though he spends most of his time surfing and wasting time.
Goia’s older sister was once Mel’s best friend but they fell out some time ago, Mel and Gia that is, Gia being the sister in question. Interestingly, Mel always felt like more of an older sister to Goia than did Gia and their relationship has thus persisted, though it is somewhat clear that Mel is far less invested in the friendship than her junior. Mel is in public relations and wouldn’t say more (not due to any conscious taciturnity but a genuine disinterest in this sort of talk), and Goia is spending her gap year waitressing and saving up funds in hope of a Central American voyage of self-discovery. None of the three seem particularly impressed that Sasha is a doctor, not in the least, which is unfortunate seeing as this may be the most interesting thing about him.
At this very moment, the two friends have retired to the ladies’ room (immediately prior to which Sasha reminded them that he still owed them a drink each and that they had better not forget), leaving the two acquaintances to engage in one of the few topics that males who are unfamiliar with each other are more than comfortable baring their souls and being honest about.
“Mel’s pretty fucking hot, bro.”
Sasha agrees wholeheartedly but is unwilling to be one of those guys, even though he knows he more than fulfils the criteria by simple fact of his owning testicles.
“You don’t reckon?” Bruno persists.
“I think they’re both attractive,” Sasha concedes.
“Goia’s cute, but Mel’s hot. Cute’s good though. Like…you should totally go there; I think she’d be keen.”
“Why would she be keen?” Sasha says, unsure of whether he is simply being interrogative or whether he is in fact hoping for some sort of a pointer.
Bruno shrugs. “She’s young. You’re a doctor. You’re black. No offence.”
“A tree shouldn’t be offended if you call it a tree. Only if you call it a plank.”
Bruno nods with a James Franco grin. “Nice. I like that.” He looks around. “This place is a bit dead tonight. It’s weird.”
“Do you come here a lot?”
“Not a lot, but I come here. I’ve been here. Before.”
“It is a Tuesday.”
“Everyday’s fucking Saturday for backpackers, bro.”
Sasha cracks a smile.
“So, like…” begins Bruno, “what would a plank be then?”
Sasha looks over at his drinking buddy, surprised that such a throwaway statement could have such staying power. He shrugs. “A starving child, a pimp, a car thief, a gangster. The usual.”
“The usual planks? Most planks are wood, you know.”
“So most car thieves are black?”
“You know what, I take back what I said back, about liking what you said about wood and planks. That was a piece of shit metaphor.”
An airless moment of uncertainty passes between the two before they finally grin and softly chuckle at the silliness of it all. Sasha watches Bruno drain all but the teeniest bubbles of foam from his glass.
“One more?” Sasha asks.
“Mate, you haven’t even finished yours.”
Sasha stares down the cloudy yellow potion half-filling his schooner and does away with it in a handful of ambitious gulps. As he is about to depart for the bar, Bruno informs him that he’s going to run to the men’s room to do a two or maybe a three. He doesn’t need to tell Sasha that he also intends on finding out where the hell Mel and Goia have hidden themselves.
So Dr Bunmi-Watkins finds himself, after a ten minute hustle at the bar, standing at a small circular table, nursing two schooners of pale ale, one of which he sips like he is an understandably overcautious orphaned fawn, all the while listening to, or rather, being forced to hear the rumbling soundtrack of inebriated chatter and aggressively virile Atlanta, Georgia krunk. He tries to part, with his eyes, the gathering patronage of tipsy travellers and predatory indigenes stumbling around Bloom Bar in hope of spotting Bruno, but more importantly, Mel and Goia, or if the universe decides to be kind, Mel, as she approaches him with a sly smile and a drink he has somehow payed for. Instead it is Bruno who materialises from the dimly lit throng and squeezes his way between two presumably Nordic blondes, both of whom he very quickly appraises almost without looking.
“My man,” Bruno says, aping Denzel Washington, accepting the beer and digging into it like a man who’s just come in from the wilderness.
“So…?”
“They’ve gone next door, dude.”
“Next door? What’s next door?”
“Another bar, bro. Well, more like a club, like, for dancing and popping pills. So this bar and the club next door share some of the same bathrooms, the ones outside. When I was coming back from taking my piss-dump,” he swallows a belch, washes it down with some alcohol, “I swear I saw them in there shaking their white lady booties. No. I saw them in there.”
Were Sasha a natural drinking man, he would pound down the glass of Fat Yak pale ale leaking condensation all over the table and soaking the cardboard placemat. On the contrary, he is certain that if he takes a sip he might throw up, just a touch. But he does take a sip and he does throw up, but only in his mind. He goddamn mentally empties out his entire twenty feet of bowel, not entirely sure why but nonetheless in the throes of catharsis.
“Should we — go?”
Bruno casts a glance Sasha’s way. “You mean should we, like, follow them into the club next door.”
“When you put it that way…”
“What way? You want to follow them, I’m down, bro. The dick wants what the dick wants.”
“I expected you to tell me it was lame.”
“I’m not saying it’s not. In a sec though. Let me just work on this a bit more,” Bruno says with a raised finger, returning to his beer like an office cog returning dutifully to his quarterly report after some trivial trans-cubicle workplace chinwag.
*
Having been denied entrance to Quigley’s @ 66 via the back way by a hulking black-clad goon, Sasha and Bruno find themselves forming the rear of a substantial queue stretching out from the front entrance, constituting mostly horny young males and a few token females who seem to be wondering why in the hell their gender hasn’t worked for them like it did all the other hot young things they are certain managed to circumvent the queue earlier tonight, in groups for that matter.
Movement of the line is currently glacial and the surrounding air is almost as cold.
Sasha’s face falls as he reads a promotion flyer that skirts the pavement near his feet, carried on the back of a light breeze.
“We have to pay?”
“It’s called a cover charge, bro,” says Bruno.
“I know what it’s called. I’m not paying it.”
Bruno faces Sasha. “You’re not coming?” The look of concern/disappointment seems startlingly earnest.
Sasha puts on a pained face. “I think I might call it in.”
“I was kinda hoping to catch up with those girls. I reckon Goia’s keen, dude.”
“Goia that bailed on us with Mel?”
Bruno gives Sasha a look that seems to say ‘come on now; be serious.’ He says with a laugh, “dude, you can’t, like, afford to feel hard done by on a night out; everyone’s drunk and just going with their mood and seeing where it takes them; don’t take it personally. Like, the night hasn’t even been born, bro.”
“Well…I think mine may have died in utero,” Sasha says, to which Bruno responds with a blank stare, not necessarily due to a lack of understanding, but most likely due to apathetic resignation and there being something else on his mind right at that moment.
The queue has been inching forward, stealing its way along, and Sasha and Bruno inching towards the entrance with it.
Sasha extends a hand. “Thanks for the company, Bruno. Hope you get to…engage in conversation with a backpacker.”
“To be honest, I’d be happy just fucking Mel,” he says with the most surreptitious wink.
They disengage hands and Sasha pokes his head out towards the kerb, looks up and down the street in search of a taxi with its tiny rooftop light switched on, which is to say, one that is available.
“Hey, Sasha. Bro.”
Sasha draws his head back in and turns to Bruno, who has sidled up to him ever so modestly.
Bruno says, “hey, could you lend me like twenty bucks. I’m broker than I thought.”
“Twenty,” Sasha’s mouth seems to say of its own volition. He stares at Bruno, who stands next to him like a crackhead hovering around his dealer, telling him how much of a “fucking champion” he is, shameless.
Mentally stamping to death wild flickers of irritation, resentment, even hate, Sasha fishes a twenty from his wallet and hands it to Bruno who slyly accepts the note in the guise of a very prolonged, very bro pound hug complete with an unnecessary back pat.
Bruno must be a master of timing, or maybe he is The Sandman himself because, the very moment they separate from the hug, Bruno is up next in line. He silently salutes Sasha, turns and flashes his ID at the front door goons and is let through so that he can pay the cover charge girl.
Sasha watches Bruno disappear up the dark stairwell leading to Quigley’s @ 66, the one that is being constantly smeared with dull flashes of strobe that have strayed from the dance floor.
*
Sitting directly behind the driver, a technique he often uses to relay his utter unwillingness to converse in any mode or manner, Sasha quietly awaits the wave of low-grade regret that he is more than certain he will have to endure at some point during the next twelve hours. He meanwhile finds himself counting the drinks he bought while at Bloom Bar, perhaps in hope of upgrading the low-grade regret to high-grade self-loathing, or rather, expediting its onset, because it always makes an appearance, without fail, given enough time.
So that would be eight drinks then, Sasha concludes in his head. Three for himself, five for Bruno, and none for those girls, or anyone that he fancied for that matter. Sixty dollars at least. That’s not counting the silly contribution he just made to Bruno’s Help Me Fuck Mel Fund. By the end of tonight, at the very least, there will be a handful of pretty happy, pretty soaked urinal cakes in the male restrooms at Bloom Bar and at Quigley’s @ 66 on Broadway, and in the outhouse that the two venues apparently share.
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Brief impression: “All That Heaven Allows”
September 7, 2014 § Leave a comment
For a film that is the product of a director renowned for his ‘melodramas’, Douglas Sirk’s 1955 picture “All That Heaven Allows”, the tale of a semi-scandalous love affair between a beautiful middle-aged widow and a much younger hunk of a gardener, derives much – if not all – of its dramatic momentum from its people rather than from its plot. If a melodramatic story is largely founded upon a plot device of some description, however extravagant, and the ways in which its characters react to said device as well as to each other’s reactions, “All That Heaven Allows” does not quite sink into that mould with ease. This is not to say that it is a better film for this reason, but it does beg the question: is the term ‘melodrama’ more misunderstood than it is understood? Whatever the answer, it is surely a term which has become – and unfairly so – a shorthand criticism for cinematic ham and cheese.
The most common modern iteration of the melodrama seems to be, ironically, the situation comedy, the half-hour sitcom wherein a group of characters with well-demarcated – often heightened – personalities are beset by an event or an insult or a misunderstanding of sorts in response to which they react and behave accordingly; according to their own individual natures and the natures of their fellow characters, but also according to the needs of the audiences who crave a somewhat embellished alternative to their own rather droll realities. This is the draw of soap operas, the reason for their extraordinary longevity and rabid following. Interestingly, there may be no need to introduce a plot device or an artificial source of conflict if the characters themselves are brash or heightened enough such that the interaction between them is sufficient for the brewing of melodrama. Admittedly, “All That Heaven Allows” features its share of individuals who are ripe and ready for their melodramatic duties: gossips, motor-mouths, pontificating pseudo-intellects and hubristic sons. Even Rock Hudson’s Ron Kirby, who initially comes across as earthy and flexible, turns out to be – in ways endearing and irritating – just as stuck in his way as the conservative hive-minds that decry the relationship he has with the older Cary Scott (portrayed soulfully and with charismatic sadness by pixie-faced Jane Wyman). The exception amongst all these characters – apart from Ron’s well-balanced friends – seems to be Cary herself. But even then, there is an authenticity and generosity in the way even the gossips and motor-mouths are portrayed by both actor and director which undercuts any sense of excess or superfluity, but more importantly there is a lightness of touch, a mellow undercurrent of naturalism that really balances out the more colourful aspects of the movie (and not just the lush, technicolour radiance).
Jane Wyman’s character is unique amongst her fictional peers in that she is reasonable and considerate in a way that may be considered overly conservative, even timid or submissive; perhaps anti-dramatic. Recently widowed and the mother of two cocksure young adults, Cary is longsuffering in the way that a good wife in fifties USA ought to have been. But unlike the usual characters that usually populate usual melodramas, she is rarely driven to acts of bombast or thoughtlessness simply as a means to satisfy her desires and add spice to the general proceedings. But she does have desires and, as the film progresses, she finds that her considerateness is rarely reciprocated or even appreciated and as a result she feels comfortable – perhaps for the first time in her fictional memory – pursuing pleasure and happiness purely for herself. Cary’s low-key yet powerful screen presence, in spite of her utter reasonableness, is evidence enough for an argument against one of the least palatable aspects of melodrama, that is to say, that bone-dry watering hole that bad dramatists continually return to in hope of injecting life into their narrative concoctions: irrational, rash, unconsidered behaviour; that which one may cheekily term ‘cinema logic’. Of course, the technicolour vibrancy of the film’s visual aesthetic is signature Sirk and may be one of the reasons it immediately strikes viewers as being a melodrama seeing as melodramas are heightened not just narratively but formally, is it not? I suppose the magic of this film lies in the German émigré director’s deft balancing of a heightened formal approach with a consequently noticeable and notable sprinkling of psychological realism, allowing of course for the that which an American drama from this period was likely required to provide if it was to attain any sort of theatrical longevity or at the very least satisfy the emotions expressiveness that Hollywood expected audiences to expect.
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Uncaged
August 26, 2014 § Leave a comment
Sammy di Stefano wasn’t willing to stick his neck out any more than he already had which was understandable, but for this Merryn Dieter reserved the right to call him names and curse his grandmother’s hooha. No one cared to comment on this. Whatever the case, Marmoset would have the chance to prove to a hostage audience that they could thrash out a tune and that they were irrefutably punk, plus Sammy’s desire to exact some kind of petty revenge on a poor assistant stage manager would be satisfied, on top of his being paid a handsome little stipend. Wins all around, in short.
*
On the eve of the Waysles Chamber Ensemble’s opening performance, and by the light of a quickly dipping sun, the band lugged their scratched black cases round the back alley way and stole into Bart Street Recital Hall through the rear entrance. They stowed their load in a quiet corner, snuck out and stole their way back in the following night, that is to say, tonight, with the distinct aim of not drawing undue attention from the orchestra members who are now currently standing around sagely, tending to their instruments as though having intimate chats with dead friends.
Clad semi-formally in black and white, the members of Marmoset remind themselves that they too are musicians and that they have every right to be backstage with these classically-trained people (of whom Merryn is one), absorbing the anticipatory buzz of the unseen audience so calmly as to be practically arrogant.
‘Do not, I repeat, do not unpack your shit until the musicians are on stage,’ di Stefano stressed to the five-piece over drinks and steaks at a pub two days earlier.
‘What are we then?’ said Raven, lead guitarist of Marmoset.
‘Sorry?’ said di Stefano.
‘I said what are we if they’re musicians? What does that make us then?’
Sammy considered Raven who had the sourest look on her face at that moment. ‘Clowns,’ he said. ‘What would you like me to say?’
He turned his attention to frontman Bosco: ‘this shit does not come back to me, ever, agreed?’
Bosco just stared at Sammy who then turned to Cyrus (his main contact with the band), smiled incredulously and said at a rather intimate range, ‘mate, that two hundred bucks hardly wets my beak; don’t let me regret being a good friend here, because I checked out your bandcamp and I’m pretty convinced I’m not doing this for your particular brand of noise.’
This was precisely when Merryn decided it was only right that she talk ill of Sammy’s granny’s nether parts. But no one cared to defend di Stefano considering noise punk was one of their genre descriptors.
*
Cyrus might not be much when he’s propped on a stool behind the drum kit making sticks pirouette across his fingers like it means something, but gosh golly did he come through and prove his worth. He probably won himself immunity against the common cold shoulder by coming through the way he did, and likely staved off eviction from Marmoset by unanimous decision for the next little while.
Raven still stands by what she says about him having no true sense of rhythm and Dieter thinks he doesn’t have even one hundredth of an ounce of what Keith Moon had when he was passed out on stage, the exact nature of what Keith Moon had when unconscious on stage being something she doesn’t seem to want to expand on or explain. He lacks oneness with the sticks, she says; hasn’t been gifted with an innate flair for the instrument he’s chosen slash been assigned slash resigned himself to playing. If bass man Otis has anything to say about Cyrus it would be that he’s too clean, too plastic (not elastic), as if he’d learned to play the drums at high school discos where the band geeks did live renditions of ‘Heart of Glass’. The rhythm section, says Otis, must be in sync like Siamese clones and Siamese clones he does not feel they are.
Bosco, generally ambivalent about his bandmates to one degree or another, hasn’t said anything worth quoting about Cyrus’s skills as a pacemaker. If he cuts one member down he’d have to cut them all, so he cuts none.
One night, after one of many regrettable fucks, Merryn Dieter began typing away on her lap computer almost as soon as Otis had come and rolled off of her.
‘What’s that you’re saying about me?’ he’d said, trying to sound as if he didn’t really mean it.
Rather than saying something in return Merryn swung the laptop across and showed him the ad she was drafting: “drummer wanted…preferably inspired by Keith Moon (though John Bonham will do and Dave Lombardo is probably acceptable)…dynamism, showmanship, personality, blue-collar understated sex appeal and unpredictability mandatory…must be powerful without overpowering…”
‘He’s not that bad.’
‘That’s probably the worst thing he could be,’ she’d said.
‘Does Bosco know?’
She took a long, deep, savoured breath.
‘I may have shown him an early draft last week, after we both came.’ That shut Otis up.
Being a friend – being the friend that scored him a spot in the band – Otis threw Cyrus pointers to help him not get the sack: ‘don’t be a metronome, Cy, be a fast fucking heartbeat. With murmurs. The murmurs being me and your brass.’
Cyrus responded by drowning everything in cymbals, which Otis felt was, at the very least, progress.
But real progress came when Cyrus had a bright idea that involved Bart Street Recital Hall, a touring orchestral ensemble that would be playing it, an assholeish friend who happened to work as a janitor at Bart Street Recital Hall, a seminal 20th century classical piece, and a then undecided sum of money.
*
The hundred plus audience patiently fills Hall C, one of Bart Street’s tinier performance spaces, configured in a mini proscenium-thrust style. A concert piano and a lonely-looking harp are the only things keeping the stage from being totally barren.
It’s a mixed crowd generally skewed towards the retired and the semi-retired though there is a smattering of families with curiously young children in tow, dressed cutely in smart casual and looking like they’ve recently budded off their parents fully formed, fully dressed, but just a bit small. Accompanying the fond glances and smiles aimed at the young’uns are the gently concerned looks of those patrons who worry that the inability of something like Sibelius’ ‘The Swan of Tuonela’ to seize a six-year-old’s attention will quash their enjoyment of tonight’s show in the sense that these bored children will fidget and squirm incessantly. Granted, this concern is tempered by an air of humility that suffuses the room, something decidedly bashful about the way the patrons shuffle along the aisles and assume their seats and the way they take shape around the stage like birds rimming a water bath. Tonight they will not be witnessing an hour-long Prokofiev opus performed by Berlin Philharmonic, but a live mixtape of twentieth century orchestral hits rolled out by a “pretty good” ensemble; a middlebrow musical degustation designed for dabblers, wannabes and musicological tourists. Of course, it’s the tiny minority whose egos are burnt by this truth because for the vast majority this will be a pleasantly “cultural” night out and a nice prelude to dinner at that restaurant down the road that does Modern European, Angelo’s Fire.
*
The doors opened at a quarter to. Just after six struck, the growing spectatorship was joined in Hall C by eleven black-clad players who appeared spectrally on stage, bringing with them a pair of violins, a viola, a cello, a clarinet, a flute, an oboe, a bassoon and a horn. For those on the floor who failed to notice this sombre manifestation on stage, on sitting down and gathering their bearings their eyes widened in gentle surprise and there was often a small smile. Parents pointed the obvious out to their offspring, hoping their excitement would be mirrored.
At eighteen minutes past the hour the hushed shuffling of bodies has now given way to a restless kind of quietness and Hall C seems somewhat dimmer though there has been no obvious dimming of any lights that anyone can attest to. People must be trying not to cough because when the first flurry of them eventually sounds they’re explosive, urgent and purgative. Then silence returns while anticipation continues.
The musicians seem to be striking a pose. Maestro strides onto the stage and in response his liege perks up ever so slightly. The audience, not used to the exact etiquette of high performance, offer brief, uncertain applause and he graciously accepts before turning his back on them, rudely almost. His baton rises, hangs poised, flickers. The first note sounds.
*
waysles chamber ensemble, september 7
(1) violin sonata in g-sharp minor, janāček
(2) vitebsk: study on a jewish theme, copland
(3) phantasy (for oboe and string trio) in f minor, britten
(4) sextet (for piano and wind quintet) op. 120, poulenc
(5) contrasts, sz. 111, bartók
(6) 4’33’’, cage
(7) string quartet no. 2 in f major, op. 92, prokofiev
(8) spiegel im spiegel, pärt
(9) string quartet no. 8 in c minor, op. 110, shostakovich
(10) 3 pieces (string quartet), stravinsky
(11) sonata, debussy
‘When in fuck’s name did this get moved?’
Bosco has his finger pulp squashed down on the double three on line seven (piece no. 6), his stare honing in on the list as though the list is expected to answer for itself. ‘Cyrus, did you fucking know about this?’
‘Know about what?’ Cyrus says, arranging his snare by shifting it here minutely and there minutely.
Bosco’s got the set list crinkled in both hands.
‘Our cue’s been pushed back three fucking spots,’ he gnarls.
‘How much time does that give us then?’ Raven says while down on her haunches, tuning her guitar.
‘More time than we fucking had before, which was too much to begin with. Not if we’re expected to get into the zone and stay in the zone and stay potent.’
Dieter is standing by the drawn curtains, listening to the violin shivering on the other side. ‘No one’s expecting us to be in any zone,’ she says. She moves away from the curtain and lifts her hand-me-down Les Paul from its case. ‘Someone with a phone, figure out how much time we have.’
‘Goddam it!’
Dieter throws Bosco a look that’s telling him to cool it, at least volume wise.
Otis approaches the frontman with an Android in his hand, his bass hanging in place from his shoulders.
‘May I take a peek?’
‘Be my fucking guest,’ Bosco says, almost tossing the sheet into Otis’s hand.
Bosco skulks off towards the rear entrance, almost certainly for a bout of chain smoking.
Otis’s eyes leaps from sheet to screen while his fingers dart across the keypad. By the number of disparaging tongue clicks and mutters emerging from his mouth, the typing errors must be flowing freely.
As for the maths, this he does in his head:
16 minutes approx.
+
12 minutes approx.
+
14 minutes approx.
+
18 minutes approx.
+
17 minutes approx.
‘We’ve got at least an hour.’
Raven is miming chord progressions, walking around on the spot, her mouth puckered up as it often does in the heat of performance. Merryn is back beside the curtain. It’s unclear whether she is enjoying the Janāček rendition or judging the way the violin and piano converse with each other, her face is so straight. Every once in a while she’ll wander back amongst the others as though taking stock of her troops.
Bosco returns stinking of unfiltereds.
‘How long?’ he says.
‘Seventy seven minutes approximately.’
Bosco turns on his heels: ‘I’ll be out back.’ He stabs an index finger at Cyrus. ‘Your fucking friend has a lot to answer for. You too.’
Raven is now miming what seems like a solo, staring after Bosco pucker-mouthed and wearing the absent gaze she often does in the heat of performance. Otis has stopped twirling his sticks and now just sits behind the drums like a deer caught in a thicket and resigned to it.
‘Typical male,’ says Merryn. ‘Beating his chest while shitting his pants.’
Eager if not rapturous applause sounds at a sudden from beyond the heavy, heavy drapes, almost in response to Dieter’s quip though obviously not. The rhythm guitarist walks away from the curtain with a contorted face. But knowing Merryn Dieter means not knowing what this face means in the slightest.
‘I still say this is silly,’ says Raven.
‘What is?’ says someone.
‘This thing we’re about to do.’
‘Silly how?’ challenges Otis, rapidly double-fingering one of his bass’s strings as though preparing to crank out ‘Eye of the Tiger.’
‘How many of these oldies are we hoping to get to our next gig? Wait. Take a step back. When’s our next gig?’
‘Well…maybe I’m too slow or something, but I thought our aim was to get notorious. Shock and appal.’
‘Shock and appal who? We’ll piss off a couple of retirees, max.’
‘Still earns us some credo.’
‘Right.’
Raven lays her guitar on the floor and does the same with her body. She stares into the rigging way up in the ceiling, then cranes her neck and visualises Cyrus behind his drums, upside down and Dutch-angled and still looking quite sullen.
‘It won’t stop being dumb,’ reiterates Raven.
‘Skim milk is dumb,’ Merryn spits. ‘This – what we’re doing – is anencephalic.’
‘Speak English?’
‘You know those babies literally born without brains? What we’re doing is what they would do if they weren’t stillborn.’
‘Wow. That’s some rough talk,’ says Otis, chugging away at those bass strings.
‘She’s got the right idea though,’ says Raven.
A mosquito viola hums from somewhere beyond the curtains.
‘Four thirty three is a punk masterpiece,’ Merryn declares. ‘You can’t outpunk it and you can’t piggyback its genius.’
‘…and now she’s got the wrong idea. Jesus, everything’s genius these days. What’s genius about it? Educate me; educate us,’ says Raven.
Otis says, ‘educate yourself,’ which Raven ignores.
‘The fact that you’ve even asked me that means you’ll never get it,’ Merryn says.
‘Because it’s all so self-evident.’
‘Because it’s not?’
‘I’ve never heard it, so how the fuck would I know?’
‘Yet you’re confident enough to talk smack about it.’
‘I’m talking smack about the concept, not the song.’
‘You can’t know the concept unless you’ve heard it. It’s not a song.’
Otis pipes up: ‘Ever get given detention, Ray? At school, sitting on the floor, nose into the wall. Silence.’
‘Plenty times.’
‘Then you know the concept.’
Merryn turns on Otis. ‘Have you listened to it, slut?’
‘Yowza.’
‘It’s not about fucking silence. It single-handedly expands the definition of music to its farthest limits. Music isn’t just created, written down and played. Music is. It just is.’
‘Right,’ Raven says. ‘So when the audience applauses, is it for the musicians who didn’t do shit, or for John Cage and his obvious cynicism and contempt, or for themselves, for buying tickets and sitting still and being cultured? Or is it for the dude who coughed at two minutes twenty seven?’
Otis’s bass line sticks its nose into the heavily pregnant silence.
‘Heathens,’ says Merryn.
Raven gazes up at the riggings and traces their lines as ‘Vitebsk’ courts her ears. She thinks aloud, ‘I wonder if anyone’s ever fallen from up there.’ She then thinks to herself, ‘if anyone did, they surely didn’t make it.’
*
Bosco now positively reeks of cigarettes and his shirt is off. He’s pacing on the spot, swinging the microphone round and round in a vertical loop, gradually increasing the radius of its path by letting the cord slip through his damp palms.
The other members of Marmoset hover in position, awaiting their cue. The final fading strains of ‘Contrasts Sz. 111’ bleed into tentative but keen applause, and as the last few smatterings dissipate, Cyrus taps his sticks, one, two, three, four.
Paired melodic chainsaws begin hacking at each other without warning, one eventually withdrawing in order to howl and whirl around the other like a mad dervish humming a nursery rhyme.
The drummer launches an assault on his skins, trying to kick a hole in the bass drum and dent his brass circles all the while bestowing a constant shower of hi-hat trills upon the proceedings.
Bosco cuts in with a barely comprehendible bellow, like a lion maddened by a thorn whose tip has broken in its paw. He appears to be eating the microphone or perhaps regurgitating it, barking about how he’ll wait for someone’s iron will to rust and how the two of them will fuck this evening, but not for lust. Or something along these lines.
Supporting him is a subterranean bass line that grumbles along before giving in to brief, hypnotic spasms of driving funk a-la Minutemen. Otis’s bass seizures are backed up by a flurry of hiccupping snares from Cyrus, who is doing much to prove his worth as a drummer at the moment.
Merryn re-engages Raven and the buzzsawing hits new heights of reverb and aggression without completely losing its melody in the hanging cloud of drone that has built up over the last forty five seconds. The two guitars jerk around each other like a couple tangoing furiously at the bottom of a swamp.
Bosco vomits into the mic before swinging it in the air, “like Cerberus chewed off his middle fucking head.” Sweat drips from his man tits and his tattooed back. The mic’s orbit sails perilously close to Raven’s head, who takes a step towards the frontman for heaven knows what reason.
Marmoset blaze through one more verse-chorus combo and round out with a minute-long freak-out, Raven beating a solo out of her instrument with the possessed swaying of a snake charmer, stabbing through the mountain of muscular noise Merryn and Otis keep piling notes onto. Cyrus may have developed ballismus, the way his arms seem to launch themselves from side to side, in utter hysterics.
Bosco swings and swings the microphone until it finally flies out of his sweaty grip and smacks into a black wall, letting off an ear popping bang, practically coinciding with the advent of the ghostly guitar shriek that seems to hang in the air seconds after the four instrumentalists have ceased playing.
The dripping frontman staggers over to where the mic lies, picks it up, makes it pop three times with the palm of his hand and declares “we’re Marmoset, spelt just like the animal. Find us on bandcamp and support our shit. Just type in Marmoset. You can now go back to having your dicks yanked by Mr Cage. Thank you. And many thanks to assistant stage manager Gordon Sezlack for his lack of vigilance.”
Merryn’s frown deepens. She yanks the lead out of her Les Paul’s jack while the amp is still turned on, letting off a screeching blast of her own.
Two hulking men in black t-shirts have appeared backstage, flanking a skinny aghast-looking man presumably in his early thirties. The heavies take a few steps towards Marmoset, but seeing as the band is already packing and the damage has already been done, they take the conservative approach and keep a close eye on things, fists clenching and unclenching like nervous anuses.
Merryn looks over at Bosco. “Unnecessary,” she says. She kneels to clip her case shut and gently calls him a dumbass.
Cyrus looks as though he is about to throw up on his skins and his left knee is bouncing madly when the applause carries over from the stage, across the drapes, weak and troubled and sparse. With as little ado as possible, an attempt at appeasing the audience is made with some Prokofiev.
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Brief impression: “Abuse of Weakness”
August 13, 2014 § Leave a comment
If there are a handful of cinematic devices used by filmmakers in the hopes of appealing to the arthouse establishment, a top five list of these would probably include: elliptical storytelling, long/extended takes, banal dialogue, narrative and thematic repetition, and hyper-naturalistic performances; of course, there are probably a handful more that are equally overused. Catherine Breillat has already established herself as one of the key voices of current French cinema, whether as undisputed queen of the so-called New French Extremity or otherwise, so it is hard to argue that her most recent film is an attempt to be ‘arthouse’ by way of somewhat rote application of the above devices, hyper-naturalistic performances aside. Why then does this (or did this initially) seem to be the case, at least in this individual’s eyes?
‘Abuse of Weakness’ is Breillat’s adaptation of her own autobiographical 2009 book of the same name, one which documents her relationship with international conman Cristophe “phony Rockefeller” Rocancourt following a debilitating stroke she suffered in 2004. Initially attracted to his dangerous charisma which she intended on translating to an on-screen performance by casting him in a film project based around the man himself, Breillat – renamed Maud Schoenberg in this film and embodied by the always dependable Isabelle Huppert – found herself writing Rocancourt a string of cheques amounting to nearly €700 000. Breillat blamed her irresponsible cheque-writing and her susceptibility to Rocancourt’s scamming skills on impaired mentation following her stroke, which – to be fair – is not the most implausible claim, an approach which successfully flew in court and subsequently landed the conman in prison.
Now, there isn’t much point in wondering why Breillat decided to convert her book into a film seeing as she was a novelist before she was a filmmaker and has up to this point based four of her films on her own literary works, including her cinematic debut. This being said, is the film intended to be a means by which the subtle or not-so-subtle gender dynamics and perhaps sexuality which may have underpinned and driven Breillat and Raconcourt’s relationship is teased apart and analysed? Because, if so, ‘Abuse of Weakness’ may not be particularly successful. In fact, the film’s achievement may be to further validate Breillat’s assertions of mental incapacity by providing barely any perceptible reasons why Breillat/Schoenberg is putty in the slimy hands of her conman muse. While the film’s version of Raconcourt, named Vilko Piran and played with some level of gusto by Kool Shen, may possess an appreciable brutish allure, this is undercut by the placement of frankly dull, almost embarrassing dialogue in his mouth. The frequent jibes and lame insults Piran lays on Schoenberg, to which the half-crippled filmmaker responds with Huppert’s signature smug smirk, seem to portray the conman as being a lot less extraordinary than €700 000 in swindled loans would suggest. As the film progresses, it would not be surprising if a viewer were almost squinting, trying to see in Piran what it is that Schoenberg sees in him, and in failing to do so, turning the squint on Schoenberg in hope of glimpsing the obvious deficiencies in her that Piran is exploiting. Unfortunately, Scheonberg – as played by Huppert – come across as being more brash, carefree and stubborn than gullible and temporarily dim, and as the film reaches its conclusion in a scene which is a lot more emotionally commanding than it perhaps has any right to be, the possibility that Breillat is still unable to truly explain exactly what was going on in her head during this fateful period in her life becomes less of a possibility and more of a tentative certainty. Was it a crush or was it love? Was it fear? The French auteur, it seems, has little to say about why exactly she fell victim to “phony Rockefeller’s” tricks (apart from the post-stroke-deficit angle). I’d say she has even less to say about Rocancourt and the effect he must have had on his other victims, probably because the key question is not about the exploitation itself but that which was exploited.
Given a handful of weeks to stew over this film, its effectiveness has risen in my estimation, almost improbably. Breillat’s use of the banal, the elliptical and repetitive now appears to be less of a cheap attempt at satisfying the arthouse mode. They truly do seem to highlight the often elusive nature of weakness, the kind that one person has for another.
the odd employment 