Sunday, September 27, 2015

Princess

Tali Shalom Ezer’s Princess is about a young girl’s reluctant awakening into the harsh adult world. The framing shots trace the story. In the first the screen is filled with the beautiful 12-year-old Adar’s blissfully sleeping face. Her doctor mother, Alma (=soul), keeps trying to wake her up, with loving caresses. In the last Adar disappears into the crowd of kids going to her new school. Her relationship with her mother has changed into a tentative cease fire.
In between, much happens. Adar has her first period. She hooks up with a young street boy Alan who looks like a tall androgynous version of her. She’s apparently expelled from her own school for truancy. She explodes at her mother, calling her a whore for putting up with her live-in boyfriend Michael. 
Michael is the snake in the grass. We first spot him sleeping behind Alma in the same bed as Adar. Later he intrudes roughly on Adar’s exploration of first intimacy with Alan. A teacher, Michael has just been fired so he stays in, cooks, and fancies himself an artist. He wants to do a nude of Adar. His relationship with Adar is at the center of the film. It may help explain Adar’s altered personality at home and her loss of engagement with school.
His relationship with Adar is immediately suspect, as it involves rough-housing, much tickling (of her), and cathartic mimes of physical battle. When Adar first spots Alan he’s doing the latter with another street kid. When Alan later mimes sexual intercourse with Adar he parodies what they hear Michael and Alma doing, but also exposes the underlying significance of Adar’s games with Michael. Though Michael is ardent in his sex with Alma he seems attracted to the boyish Adar. She still has an androgynous body and Adar is a gender-neutral name (as the actor playing Alan reminds us). To desexualize his romps with Adar Michael calls her “Prince,” which only confirms his bisexuality. 
When Michael joins Alan in bed Adar tries to bring her mother to see “the worst thing in the world.” She won’t come. Michael’s rape of Alan leads to the lad’s violent departure, Adar’s pain and her anger at her mother’s refusal to face the truth about her boyfriend. To be fair, Alma does perform a nutcracker suite on Michael but she fails to expel him. She knows but won’t admit to herself what he is. After Adar’s first period, Alma blames her not Michael for the dangerous physicality of their ostensibly playful relationship. 
The two English songs also carry the film’s burden. The first is ‘You don’t own me,” a young girl’s hopeful declaration of independence. The last song is a valedictory for the lost Alan and for Adar’s lost innocence: “I never thought of changing/But now I can't forget you./The days are lost without you….As far as the eye can see/Is much too far for you to be.” 
For an Israeli film, this is remarkably free of any religious reference whatever. Even the "soul" character, Alma, is a doctor, focused on the body's health. The lesson Adar learns from Alma is that life requires compromise, a moderation of ideals, a withdrawal from absolutes, if the family or emotional peace is to continue, however fragile. Perhaps that’s what this film is saying to Israelis, as a new generation steps out of the traditional political narratives and seeks a psychological dynamic as true for the individual psyche and the family as for the nation. From Alan she learned the need to carry a switchblade. 



Saturday, September 26, 2015

Dheepan

Dheepan is the film’s titular hero, the battleground and a fabrication. A Sri Lankan Tamil Tiger takes up a strange woman and a nine-year-old orphan girl in order to escape the civil war into France. They assume the identity and passports of the dead Dheepan, his wife Yalini and his daughter.  When we forget the lead characters’ real names they become the ghosts, the afterlives, of their namesakes.
The film opens on the woman, not Dheepan, as she scurries through a refugee camp looking for an orphan to “adopt” as her ticket out. She’s assigned her “husband.”
Director Jacques Audriard follows the three principals’ struggles to slip into the refugee’s life in France. The new Dheepan works as a tenement block janitor and lands a caregiver job in a neighbouring block for Yalini. Her M Habib personifies PTS, for whatever cause. The three refugees struggle to learn rudimentary French and to find their way in a confusing culture.
     An emotional connection develops between the man and the woman but Yalini resists connecting to the little girl, considering her a means to escape not a responsibility. 
The refugee’s difficulties in assimilation are dwarfed by the recidivist tensions they bring from their past. The janitor tries to resist his old rebel leader’s demands he raise money to buy Lebanese arms for his shattered forces back home. The scene revives the war within Dheepan. He revives his old militance and violence when a drug gang war erupts between the two tenement blocks. As the incipient family seems about to be shattered by this war, Dheepan relents and returns Yalini’s passport, which he’d commandeered to keep her from fleeing to London. 
The film is an extremely moving experience. All three leads command our empathy. When Yalini pleads on her cellphone for her passport she’s in a long shot, framed in a small window with the “daughter” isolated in another box far right, two pockets of light in the black block. 
The film provides a comprehensive vision of contemporary refugees and their accommodation. There’s a dignity in their urgent needs, their hunger for freedom and community, and a respect for their resourcefulness, as all three prove very capable and fine potential citizens. But there is also that baggage: the fury and violence they fled revives in their new setting. 
The film ends with an optimistic epilogue. London in the spring, the three are enjoying a family and neighbourhood afternoon party. Dheepan seems to be driving a cab and he has an infant child. In the last shot Yalini runs her ring-less left hand through his hair affectionately. The whole scene seems fake. Of course if we think it doesn’t ring true we might well assume this very accomplished director wants us to think it doesn’t ring true. Why would we think he screwed up now?
The scene has a brightness and cheer unprecedented in this film, musically as well as visually. That is, it seems imported from another. Now, it takes a good while for an immigrant to get to drive a London cab. And we have seen nothing to bridge the characters’ last scene in France and this one in London. If indeed the couple did marry there would be a ring on the woman’s finger. 
     Conclusion: that ending is not an event but a fantasy. It’s the possibility that the shivered if not shattered couple in France hold out as a possible dream they might yet realize. That bit of film fibbing tells perhaps another profound truth about the eternal refugee. Whatever the disappointments, however inescapable the violence and ineluctable their failures, they can always dream of yet another escape that might just — against all their experience — this time work.

Saturday, September 19, 2015

Black Mass

As the title suggests, Black Mass exercises a Satanic evil — in a
character paradoxically named Whitey.

Like the real-life character, this Whitey Bulger is a killer with
reptilian charm whose psychopathology goes far beyond the proffered
explanation of LSD experiments at Alcatraz. He's driven to build and
secure a criminal empire but relishes torture for its own sake.

While Bulger is careful not to be seen taking a satchel of money, we
see him strangle and shoot people. He has a limited fastidiousness. The
genre usually has the boss delegate such hands-on work. These graphic
scenes connect Whitey to his crimes, even as he's coldly detached from
any emotional connections other than his mother and son, who both die
early. Even when he offers his young son guidance it's on how to get
away with violence not to eschew it.

Whitey hates rats but he can rationalize turning informer for the FBI.
it's a business arrangement, by which the feds will help the Irish gang
boss wipe out his rival Mafiosa.

The film's central theme is the antithesis of connections and "pulling
the plug." That phrase recurs. Whitey implicitly pulls the plug on his
girlfriend when she explicitly says she'd pull the plug on their
brain-dead son.

There's a constant tension between a character's respecting his bond
and breaking it. Hence the narrative's structure, reminiscences by his
gunsels turning state's witness against him. So, too, Whitey's frequent
strategy of pretending to forgive and accept someone immediately before
killing him/her.

There's a wide range of connections here. Whitey's brother is a leading
state politician who steers completely clear of Whitey's criminal life.
But he has to resign from his university chancellorship when he's found
to have been in contact with the fugitive Whitey. In that fraternal
connection, he failed to pull the plug completely enough.

The third of these childhood friends is FBI agent John Connolly, who
uses his old connection to enlist Whitey as informer. For failing to
pull the plug he goes down. So does fellow agent John Morris, who moves
from tentative conspirator to terrified. Typical of Satanic evil,
Buiger has a seductive pull that enables a rationalization of justice
to gloss the self-interest. The dapper suit, gold watch and new-found
swagger are but signs of Connolly's corruption by his fidelity to his
old friend.

The Bulger boys' mother loves both, obviously, and may or may not be
guilty of cheating Whitey at gin. But Connolly's wife pulls the plug on
their marriage when she's exposed to Whitey's insinuating evil
unmasked. As described above, Whitey pulls the plug on his relationship
before his girlfriend does.

Whitey and Connolly — but not Whitey's legit brother — make a big deal
out of their old friendship and their connection to the neighbourhood.
Here loyalty covers a multitude of sins and moral compromise. So, too,
Whitey's brief service to the IRA's cause, an extension of his role of
Irish warrior against the Italian gang, the South Side of Boston
against the North. Where you're from is a much-touted bond, to compel
loyalty, but the truly moral will pull that plug when virtue requires.

Gunsel Steven is connected to his girlfriend's daughter but overextends
that connection in their sexual relationship. When the cops probe her
connection to Whitey's gang he strangles her. When Whitey turns against
Morris for revealing his family's secret marinade recipe, he
demonstrates the sinister danger in any connection to such evil. The
scene ends with Whitey's even more chilling violation of Connolly's
wife. The only healthy character in the house, she pleads illness.

There are two humorous replays of the theme. An end credit promises no
profits have resulted from the film's use of cigarettes. That is,
nothing is connected to the smoke. And the film's most senior law
officer is played by Kevin Bacon, mister six degrees of
separation/connection himself.

Obviously the film's subject goes beyond Whitey Bulger to America's
knotted and inextricable binding of good and evil, the criminal and the
law. One hand washes the other. The film derives not just out of the
gangster genre but out of the even more characteristic American
tradition, the Western. There American civilization is rooted in the
gun and the noose. Gunmen brought "civilization" to the wilds and
gunmen secure their families and relationships in the urban jungle.

These days that paradox extends even further, to the international
tyrants that America befriends and supports in its own thus morally
compromised interests. Hello Saudis and Iran. Goodbye, naive confidence
in any easy honour.

Thursday, September 17, 2015

The Heat (2013)

Since Spy (see separate blog)  established Melissa McCarthy and director Paul Feig as a major voice in American popular film, their 2013 The Heat rewards a revisit. The film didn’t win the fan or critical reception it deserved because it was too revolutionary. Spy glided in on the rails The Heat laid down. 
McCarthy’s cop Mullins is the antithesis to the Hollywood heroine. She’s a fat broad, loud mouthed, spewing more profanity in one scene than the whole David Mamet canon. She’s like a Falstaff but with principles and courage, an otherwise unconstrained Id that serves her one cause, the law.  Hollywood heroines aren’t supposed to be unapologetically fat. They have to wear makeup (even in their sleep, apparently). They have to be gentle, sensitive nurturers, unquestioningly serving civilization — especially its men and patriarchal institutions. 
Sandra Bullock’s Sarah Ashburn plays that role here. Note the conventional character merits a first name, the outlaw doesn’t. Sarah is thin, neat, enslaved to decorum and manners, but with an intuitive perception that shows up the merely mortal men in the police force. She has the potential to break out, as we see in her disdain for the conventional expectations the force has of its women. So she’s unpopular — her one similarity to Mullins which makes their ultimate harmonizing plausible. Otherwise they are poles apart: in language, fashion, methodology, self-control.
     As well,  both have a self-doubt with familial roots: Sarah was orphaned, Mullins rejected by her amoral family. Their opposite responses are Mullins' radical self-loathing and Sarah's detachment. 
Foreshadowing Spy, the effulgent outlaw McCarthy character proves a more effective agent of justice — poetic as well as legal — than the more decorous women. She unleashes a physical strength that the more feminine Sarah seems to catch from her — as when she works through a stabbing and head-butts her captor. For all her wildness Mullins notices the incongruous cigarette butt — and creates a disturbance to enable Sarah to grab it. “Who closes the door to take a shit?” Mullins indignantly asks, short on the feminine demure.
Yet in the McCarthy-Feig world the fat broad has sexual as well as comic appeal. Here she’s dogged by a smitten one-night-stand. She finally shakes him off with a sentimental platitude that the unsophisticated suitor might apprehend: “It’s not you, it’s me… God, buddy, do you not hear how pathetic everything out of your mouth sounds? I mean, there's a girl out there for you, but it's not... it's not me. Maybe it's her. [indicating Ashburn] Her lady business is like an old dirty attic. Full of broken Christmas lights and like doll shoes and shit. Why don't you clean THAT out for her?” Well, it starts out as a sentimental platitude. Sarah defends herself feebly: “Uh, that's a... that's a misrepresentation of my vagina.” Of her vagina perhaps, but not of her personality. 
Clearly Mullins rejects — transcends— sentimentality. She jailed her brother to save him from the drug netherworld. Mullins identifies the passing driver who honks and gives her the finger: “My mom.” Her filthy apartment is in the druggies’ building, though her windows are boarded up with target practice posters. A lifelong victim of prejudice, Mullins snaps into her own: An albino cop is “Snowcone” — and her instant suspect. “You're giving her beauty advice? Do you even own a fucking mirror?” Of course the real villain is Snowcone’s young handsome (i.e., “normal”) partner.  
But the main element in Mullins’ character, the animating force of the film, its energy and wit, is Anger. Not just anger, as in discontent or resentment, but Anger. Rage.
     Mullins seems to react with fury against every little thing that goes wrong in her life: a missed clue, a usurped parking space, a recalcitrant witness, a surprising gunsel, etc. But her rage operates on and derives from something deeper: her sense of the radical injustice of the situation of women in our culture.
     For Sarah, coolly exposing her male colleagues’ inadequacy and her superiority is enough. She is sufficiently privileged as a conventional beauty to be thus easily satisfied. So she holds everything in, her emotions as well as the body parts which her Spanx holds “together.… everything where it's supposed to be.” But the fat and clumsy Mullins has no such consolation, so her every expression, whether verbal or physical, is rage. Her anger becomes a self-perpetuating weapon: “I’ll kill her with your dead body.”
The film picks up the Mullins spirit. It explodes simple sisterhood and gender stereotypes. When Sarah phones her superior to remove her irritation Mullins calls her “Tattletits. Fuckin narc.” An end credit points to the reduction of women to their sexuality: Gina’s boobs are played by Jessica Chaffin’s boobs. In the last scene an off camera woman says “I left my baby in the car.” This is not a film about woman’s conventional responsibility.  
     The film takes its energy and thrust from Mullins because she has a Falstaffian appetite for life. Instead of Dentine she nibbles on a red pepper. When the film settles into the genre’s sentimental conclusion — yes, the two women become bosom buddies — Mullins’ official recognition  by the police department is imaged in her reduction to the uniform: she wears one. But her spirit reasserts itself. She howls, leaps in the air and mimes the conversion of her trophy into a discuss hurl. Even though she has been accepted she will always find a way to be her unsocialized self.

Saturday, September 5, 2015

Mistress America

Noah Baumbach’s Mistress America is such a dense literary text with so many fresh, surprising characters that it’s hard to find a single path in. So here are 13 ways to read it.


  1. It’s like one of those parties that are like Tracy’s freshman experience: there’s so much wit and intelligence going on but you’re outside of it all. You want to fit in so you keep trying, like the students’ applications to the Moebius literary club, even though you know the in-crowd are phonies (nerds with briefcases) and the initiation is a shocking assault. So we can take the film that way: enjoying it from outside without trying to dig in. Or not. 
  2. The film is like the Moebius strip, a single surface that curves back to itself with an illusion of depth. Like these characters in all their self-absorption. Like their stories. 
  3. As Brooke finally admits, “Being a beacon of hope for the rest of the world is a lonely business.” Blonde Brooke is like America, the light unto the nations in her freedom, energy, independence — but she’s wearing thin. Tracy’s story exposes Brooke’s fear of having lost her vivacity, of having been found out, a carcass on the run. 
  4. It’s a new take on The Great Gatsby. Tracy is the writer, the observer, enrapt at Gatsby/Brooke’s panache and glamour. Then the party’s over and in the dawn the shimmering shallows of Me-First America are revealed. When Tracy develops her new confidence it’s only Brooke’s delusion: “If I could only find my style, I'd be the most beautiful woman in the world.”
  5. Every tale is a betrayal, we’re told pre-credit, but only if you let it be. The bitter former schoolmate’s attack on Brooke acts out in the second half: as Brooke says, the girl should be over that cruelty by now. If she isn’t it’s her problem not Brooke’s. Tracy’s story is a betrayal only if Brooke lets it be. In the event, she has kept the literary issue with it and at the end resumes her friendship with Tracy even though their parents’ broken engagement has ended their family relationship.
  6. These heroines enjoy a sisterhood that doesn’t depend upon their being (half) sisters. They hit it off the way the flashy city mouse and the earnest, hopeful, easily impressed country mouse always do. Each meets the other’s need, one for a performer, the other for an audience. In an absurd parody of sisterhood Brooke’s ex-friend and betrayer Marnie-Claire gives Tracy a list of 12 questions — all irrelevant to the betrayal issue at hand — to test her on feminist issues. In an unfeminist way, Marnie-Claire admits to having married Dylan for money and is terrified at Brooke’s return to him.
  7. There are no grown-ups in this contemporary America. Brooke talks about her mother’s death a lot but not about her mother; she’s Brooke’s excuse for drama. Tracy and Brooke are effectively on their own, whether or not their parents marry. Brooke’s father breaks off the wedding when Tracy’s mother refuses to embrace Catholicism. Brooke laughs off his assuring “Home is only a half hour away.” Psychologically they are much further apart. Tracy’s mother reacts to the broken engagement by retreating to Tracy’s college bed, weeping, then goes off for a weekend with friends in the Bahamas, abandoning her planned Thanksgiving with her daughter. Paradoxically, the parents’ split brings their daughters back together. Tony declines to go home to have fried turkey with jealous Nicolette and her father. Though Brooke is 12 years older than Tracy she provides no moral compass: “There's no adultery when you're eighteen. You should all be touching each other all the time.” She’s resigned to “end up doing something depressing, but young.”
  8. Without traditional guides Tracy and Brooke visit a seer who consults with the spirit world. He only reflects what they tell him. They have to deal with their pasts. If Brooke is not in her body she’s four feet off to the left. 
  9. Our Western problem is too much freedom to develop our selves. Brooke yearns for medieval times when everyone’s role in life was pre-determined for them, whether peasant or king. Now she has the freedom to find new selves for herself, new plans, new roles to play, and it’s overwhelming. Tracy grows through these experiences to find a new confidence and courage, to overcome her awe at the apparently successful Brooke. But Brooke swings through her dreams and failures ending up — applying for college, with the surprising rationale: “I’m no amputee.” Her world having collapsed around her, Brooke explains why she’s leaving: “New York isn't the New York I used to know. There's too much construction.” In LA she’ll seem well-read. 
  10. Reality is what you decide to believe. Brooke’s cats are no longer stolen when she decides to give them to Marnie-Claire. Dylan buys into Brooke’s fantasy — only to bail her out of it, then start dreaming of an illicit affair on the side (“I like fat arms”). Brooke has to abandon her dream in order to thwart his: “I was not brought up that way.” To Dylan’s re-smitten “Whatever you're doing, it's working,” she wearily replies: “No, it isn’t.” Brooke can’t articulate her pitch — she needs Tracy to flesh out the fantasy.
  11. The modern liberated energy is frightening. Tony needs “someone I can love, not keep up with.” As the pregnant and literary tax lawyer Karen’s husband seems never to retrieve her, he may have been scared off by her power too. The book club of pregnant women discussing Faulkner’s The Hamlet and Derrida are (i) Tony’s young intellectual’s fantasy, (ii) a twist on our expected Stepford wives notion of suburbia  and (iii) an extension of Brooke’s awesome flash. Of course, Nicolette beats Tony at chess. Her insecurity and jealousy do not augur harmony: “Why don't you just put pasta up her pussy?”
  12. Dylan “just learned what case-sensitive meant, like seriously, yesterday.” Here’s what we’ve learned. In this film everyone is a sensitive case. Especially the character who seems the most airily successful and soaring. “Of course it's possible to hurt me,” says Brooke, “I'm the most sensitive person.”
  13. Great party.

Wednesday, September 2, 2015

The Diary of a Teenage Girl

You don’t have to be or remember being or know or parent a teenage girl to find yourself addressed by The Diary of a Teenage Girl. Its broader theme is the danger of power, especially the sexual license which the setting — San Francisco, 1976 — emblematizes. 
Young Minnie discovers both her sexual and her creative power as she’s deflowered by her mother’s boyfriend Monroe and draws cartoons in the style of (R Crumb’s wife) Aline Kominsky.  (Monroe, by the way, may be a studly ballooning of Jules Feiffer’s nebbish hero of the time, as Minnie proves a long way away from the cartoon style of Mickey and his gal.) The animation scenes show her living in a state of heightened awareness, life bursting out and into art.
Both endeavours prove dangerous. Her affair threatens her mother’s shaky security and her art-work can strike the conventional (e.g., Monroe) as freaky as her exuberant sex strikes a younger lover. Her other creative enterprise, tape recording her confessions, blows up the scene. Art and sex are avenues of self-discovery and self-realization — dangerous. Both are life-affirming but both herald the frightening responsibilities of adulthood.
Minnie is obviously the film’s central subject and consciousness. Self-conscious about her physical imperfections, she succumbs to her mother’s and Monroe’s invitations to assert her sexuality. Full credit to Bel Powley for an astonishing, shameless and vanity-free presentation.
But the other women are significant too. There’s Minnie’s “white trash — but in a good way” best friend, in whom she entrusts teen confidences but who steals a bout with Monroe herself. 
There’s the lesbian lurking in the bush who seduces Minnie only to exploit her for her own purposes. So you don’t have to be a man to exploit a trusting young girl — though Monroe demonstrates how swaggering manhood and convenient access are a huge advantage.  
     Monroe’s casual predation shows how his power can destroy him too. He knows he shouldn’t do what he does and he knows Minnie is manipulating him but he can’t control himself. He even drifts into Charlotte’s silly web to resolve the issue: Monroe must marry Minnie. He’s too easily satisfied even to realize his own small dream of a mail-order vitamin empire. Remote infusions define him. The fact that he lets himself be seduced by young Minnie shows him victim of his own passivity, a character wholly without character.
But the two other key characters are Minnie’s mother and younger sister. Charlotte was a highschool beauty, is still as beautiful and enchanting as Kirsten Wiig, surrounded by lusting lovers — and is paralyzed by that former power. She desperately clings to romance because she feels she has lost her sexual appeal and beauty. As her egotistical ex-husband Pascal insensitively declares, she can’t run her own life. We watch her drift from one stupor to the next, abandoning Minnie to Monroe and latenite TV, eventually being fired from her library job. Only the fear that her anger may have driven Minnie to suicide sobers her up sufficiently to embrace her prodigal daughter. At the end, though, Charlotte is still “seeing” Monroe, unable to escape her enslavement to her sexual liberty with him. “We can never talk about it,” she instructs Minnie, but she can’t leave the man who humiliated her either.
     Kid sister Gretel shows more hope. Without either her beautiful mother’s or her plainer sister’s looks she has to find another path to mature self-respect. With her mother’s shallowness as one model, she finds a preferable one in the new Minnie. From her she learns that she doesn’t need a man or a relationship for self-respect. The two sisters used to fight and swap bitter notes but at the end they frolic together, with an exuberance that bonds them as women, as sisters.