Le Amiche: (Juxta)Posers

Having never seen a pre-L’Avventura Antonioni, wasn’t sure what to expect with this one. Was determined, entering into it, not to give it any kind of privileged “Antonioni” reading. Really wanted to look at it simply as a text, a film, a whatever, apart from favoring a distinctly auteur-ial bent. So much for that. Watching Le Amiche, one wonders if Antonioni’s so-called “new film grammar” heralded in L’Avventura was simply the first time someone else noticed it. There’s certainly a unique visual grammar afoot in Le Amiche, although maybe not as developed as in Antonioni’s 60s films. The foregrounding and backgrounding of characters is constant; so much so that it almost becomes odd when two or more characters aren’t separated by depth of field in a shot. This distance keeps characters disconnected by cinematography and body language. While on the same plane of existence they’re never quite on the same page. Often other mis-en-scene emphasize the distance, such as colors, postures, lighting, and states of being (living and dead).

Netted

Images of alienation are ubiquitos, though that’s an Antonioni buzzword. Too, the “sickness of eros” is everywhere. Like the quadrilogy in the early 60s, Le Amiche centers on female characters who are bored and/or sick with regard to love. And like those later films, there is no one at all in this film with a healthy love life. The whole world is diseased. Contemporary eyes are prone to see just rampant stereotyping: women who base their identity on their men and men who get bored with their women after a little sex. These films of Antonioni’s, however, have an unflinching frankness about the details of erotic boredom and its consequences.

Juxtaposed

What may separate Le Amiche most from later Antonioni is its harshness. The film begins with a woman attempting suicide and failing. It ends with the same woman completing the act after an inability to move past the circumstances that caused the initial attempt. The film refuses a cheap solution, rather focusing on the darker, perhaps more real half of existence that many films would rather suppress. The ultimately successful suicide may be darker than necessary for Antonioni to get his point across. This narrative element is rendered darker still with many characters in the film joking about the woman’s ineptness even to kill herself. Further, the film does not end with the suicide, but continues just long enough to emphasize the rest of “le amiche” and their men. Just because one life has ended doesn’t mean that the story, and its very real-world correlations Antonioni draws, are over.

Universal opening

Doubled foreground

Demoted action

Spaced out

Stoned countenance

Light & darkness

Backwards

Un'avventura

Don't take no credit card to ride this train

Ball of Fire: Growing a Pair

Snow White for Adults

Ball of Fire is straight-up Howard Hawks: the middle child bearing strong traits of the earlier Scarface and the later Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Have to love the tool of language as an explicit and implicit symbol of miscommunication among the characters. Hawks here is toying with the effect of a single woman upon a group of men, implying early on that she can pretty easily outnumber them, a la Gentlemen. The narrative won’t resolve in this case, however, without falling back into the impotent female subjugated to the men. It’s got plenty of self-acknowledged references to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and in the end Barbara Stanwyck’s character marries Gary Cooper’s and, by association, the rest of his cronies. Compared to Stanwyck’s pre-code films, Ball of Fire very much puts her back in her place as a woman fundamentally without power. Perhaps it’s the undeniably presence of her potent sexuality that ultimately led to Hawks problematizing the gender dynamics as he later did in Gentlemen. Although the women in Gentlemen are still very much on display for the men (within the film and in in the viewing audience), the dialogue at the very least gives more of a voice to the women than it does to the men. In so doing, the film implies the beginning of the feminist movement: lots of women talking powerfully over men but still being gawked over as they do so. In Ball of Fire, interestingly, the group of men require Stanwyck’s character in order to complete their encyclopedia. Without her input about modern jargon and street slang, the men are the mutes, the vocally impotent. Once she gives them the info they need, she returns to a state of merely bodily power over the men and becomes a pawn between the sweet academics and the ruthless gangsters.

Images courtesy of this guy.

Quickies, Vol. XXVII: Bromances, sort of

Pirate Radio (dir. Richard Curtis, 2009) – As movies go, bad. But, it’s another example of the mythologizing of the 60s, as seen in other rock ‘n roll period films like Almost Famous and Taking Woodstock. Like those, this one centers on a male youth who’s a fish-out-of-water, an audience stand-in that helps us relate to the wild world of the then. The era is remembered with fondness, a time of innocence and blossoming, letting loose our scruples and letting our wild juices flow. It’s decidedly overly utopian, even when it does acknowledge an opponent out to get them. In this case, it’s Kenneth Branaugh, whose character is such an irredeemable villain that the audience has nothing to grab a hold of. He has no humanity, no motivation, no incentive other than taking down people who like contemporary music. We’re never shown his underlying affections, only his rampant hatred. It would be funny if it weren’t so serious.

Old School (dir. Todd Phillips, 2003) – It had been awhile. This time more than ever, was overwhelmed by the presence of phalluses. This is a textbook case of the bromance, or the dickflick, after all. Women so don’t matter in this world. The men all move in with each other. They kiss each other. They hug each other. They treat each other with the kind of affection they are incapable of showing to women (“You’re my boy, Blue!”). They hate Dean Pritchard, as does the film itself, which is interesting. He plays a gay-ish character, while the rest of them are defined simply by their homoeroticism. The former is shameless and consummated, while the latter is closeted and defined only by desire.

Oceans Eleven (dir. Steven Soderbergh, 2001) – Pure entertainment, for the most part. It’s not a “bromance,” technically, but it’s an all-boys show for sure. Julia Roberts is the token woman presence, which functions, of course, as an excuse for all the guys to get together and take down a man who’s defined by lack of community, unlike this crew. It’s also a celebrity-fest, obviously. The men here are portrayed as the sex objects they are in “real life,” with Brad Pitt in particular wallowing in own beautiful image. He does here what Sandra Bullock used to do all the time (maybe she still does; who knows?): eat constantly while maintaining a beautiful figure and complexion, stirring a raging jealousy in us alongside a desire both to have him and to be him.

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (dir. Adam McKay, 2004) – While it mightn’t immediately jump to one’s mind as a bromance, this is the real deal, no doubt. Multiple and lengthy sequences exist in which male members of the news crew both express their undying affection for one another and their undying loathing for the addition of a woman to the staff. An interesting feature of the bromance, which is reflected in Anchorman, is how the films themselves work as opportunities for male bonding in the viewing experience. The films not only depict repressed men in love with one another, but they encourage homoerotic bonding in male viewers and completely reject the possibility of allowing female viewing pleasure as a woman. To appreciate the comedy of these films, a woman must deny herself and assume a male position. The way female characters even speak in these movies causes wonder as to why an actress would accept such a role. The dialogue forces her to speak solely for male pleasure, catering to the misogyny (however ridiculous it may be suggested to be) of the male audience.

The Dreamers: 3-Way Cinephilia

Les cousins dangereux

Previous advisor had this one on the syllabus of an undergrad film theory course, and for good reason (although many of us would never put it on any syllabus). It doesn’t take a critic or a scholar to see that Bertolucci’s obsessions with politics, sex, and cinema all collide here. This film is worthy of consideration from numerous vantage points. A study of its spaces would be worthwhile, for example. The apartment functions in a new way from that of the apartment in Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris. Here, it’s loaded with Freudian imagery and phenomenological implications. This apartment is a nest, as Gaston Bachelard would probably have it. It’s a safe haven for idealists who pretend to be political while being ignorant of real politics. They are on a backwards journey, returning to a womb-like state at the phase in life when they should be growing up. The two French siblings, Theo and Isabelle, are twins, so their need to be together in a shared fetal state makes some sense. Only an outsider like Matthew could offer an alternate point of view and insist that they need to “grow.” Isabelle’s fractured psyche, split into multiple selves, comes out most overtly when we see her for the first time in her bedroom. She first appears as Venus di Milo, presenting herself as a sex object with no arms (i.e., no agency). This hearkens back to a subtle early scene in which her father displays frank affection to Isabelle with his hands. Once Isabelle approaches Matthew in her bedroom, she is captured by three mirrors, illustrating her different selves precisely at the moment when one Isabelle (the carefree hedonist) is interrupted by another (the little child incapable of maturing), as she hears music from the room next door where she knows her brother is being intimate with another woman.

Fake chains; poser

It’s also a study in France during the late, politically revolutionary days of the 60s. Unlike other, more mythological 60s films, The Dreamers doesn’t take a simple, nostalgic route. Something tragic is present from the beginning, largely due to the obvious idealism of the young characters and the background political dissension. The characters love cinema, so the film uses cinematic tricks to connect those issues in the 60s with the film before us. The twins’ failure to recognize their own political idealism (read: ineptitude) is part of the film’s tragedy, and Matthew’s failure to recognize his unique brand of American idealism is another part. Bertolucci examines modern film theory with a reverse lens. Rather than a study of spectators in a theater imbued with life experiences and sometimes mistakenly seeing reality in the screen, these youths see the screen everywhere in the real world. They talk and move as if they are in films, and Bertolucci intercuts the film with other, older films. They inhabit a fantasy world inside an apartment and escaping mostly just to visit the cinematheque. They get just as riled up over whether Keaton or Chaplin is greater as they do regarding the Vietnam War. It’s not that they don’t care about the war to some extent, it’s that they care about movies just as much.

Darkroom, or, the id-side

Then there’s the poetry vs. politics element. Theo and Isabelle decry their father’s political ambivalence on account of his status as a poet. He prefers to write what he writes and let his poems do the rest of the work. His children, on the other hand, love filmmakers like Godard who infuses all of his films with political ideals (incidentally, political ideals of the sort that did not ultimately cling to the cultural fabric in a lasting way). The film seems to present the youngsters as something like naive hypocrites discovering their own way in life and failing; it is called The Dreamers, after all. Their existence is an affluent one in an apartment removed from the political goings-on of the real world. Their own misguided voyage of self-discovery brings them into a little tent, a fascinating picture of three adolescents desperately trying to rebuild a womb to reenter. Once they’re back in, who else discovers them but their parents, confused and saddened. Once Isabelle realizes they were caught, she attempts a murder-suicide, one of the more dramatic attempts at creating an identity and legacy that history has known. Even a gesture such as this, however, fails. A part of the political demonstration outside the apartment literally invades their intimate and doomed space via a broken window. They wake up and Isabelle quickly covers up her attempt to kill herself, her brother, and Matthew. Now that the political realm is right outside their window, Theo and Isabelle take up arms in the futile cause. Matthew is at least consistent enough to know he shouldn’t take part in a violent demonstration. The twins, however torn from the womb they are, participate in an outside cause based on convenience and ease. Their attachment to each other becomes a mobile womb, since the womb in the apartment has been compromised, violated. Matthew’s previous inclusion is perhaps to blame, so when they’re given the chance to part ways with him, they seize it.

Art or politics

The originals...

...the copycats

...and Freaks.

Injecting cinema into life

 

Culinary idealism

Cracked & broken

Screen goes fuzzy

Politics stuck in the background

Repression depression

Death in the womb

Rebirth?

Love and Other Drugs: Traditional Rom-Com

Has been an interesting and, daresay, even worthwhile month at the theater. Have been prone to believing that the the cineplex is only worth indulgence for what promise to be really great films or the occasional blockbuster that makes a big screen and big sound worthwhile. Rom-coms such as Morning Glory and, now, Love and Other Drugs are great samples of the contemporary status quo. They’re as formulaic as they come, they contain an obligatory number of stars in order to succeed at the box office, and they’re assembled by an efficient team of experts in the field of entertainment-production. Use of the word “assembled” is appropriate here, since it’s so much the editing on which these films rely. Love and Other Drugs hardly features a shot longer than five seconds unless it counteracts such a lengthy take by saturating it in melodramatic music, closeups, or saccharine dialogue. This flashy style of editing isn’t limited to rom-coms, however. Peter Jackson’s version of King Kong similarly felt like a montage of images that hardly had time to prove they were cinematic rather than photographic on account of how short each shot was. This relieves the uncomfortable possibility of the audience having to look closely at something or someone, of lingering on something that takes some thought to absorb. But these are all details…

What’s really interesting about these formulaic rom-coms is how predictable they’ve become in terms of themes and values, not just story. Certainly there’s narrative predictability; they are often condemned for this, but that’s silly. It’s precisely narrative predictability that draws audiences to return to particular genres and makes genres, at least in part, what they are. Westerns, noirs, Shakespearean tragedies, comedies, etc., all have narrative forms to which they stick more or less. What’s interesting about them, and what makes certain films/books/plays great is not their ability to dodge spectator expectations regarding the story but what they do within the boundaries of their genres. (Granted, these days the lines separating genres are hazier than ever, and that takes us into another realm for another day.) Rom-coms, whether they’re bromances or the more standard kind, have lately been noteworthy for their highly traditional moral messages. A bromance such as The 40 Year-Old Virgin is a classic case of this. Presenting itself on the surface as a crass, crude, and immoral excuse for perverse comedy, it embraces the conservative value of chastity like very few films in recent memory. Like that film, many other comedies these days begin with the premise that sex is a basic human right and everyone should be able to go to almost (yes, “almost”) whatever lengths necessary to be able to have sex. The idea that anyone would be forbidden sex just because, say, s/he isn’t married is considered absurd at the outset of most of these films. A trailer that preceded Love and Other Drugs for an upcoming comedy with Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman (can’t remember the title) is based on two lifelong friends who decided to enter into a “benefits” stage of their friendship. As expected, and as even the trailer reveals, one of them does the unthinkable and falls in love with the other, who exclaims dramatically, “Why can’t we just have sex?!!” Of course, now it’s the female character who makes this exclamation: Natalie Portman’s character in that case, and in the case of Love and Other Drugs, Anne Hathaway’s character. These rom-coms pretend to subvert gender stereotypes by making the women the sex-hungry characters and letting them objectify the men. However, as the narrative moves forward, the sex is shown to be empty and the man is the one who recognizes that only a lasting relationship can fill the void. So, the moral to the story (on a narrative level) is that an exclusively sexual relationship is ultimately hollow; you need a real and lasting connection. Second, it’s mainly the man who has to teach this lesson to the woman, after learning it for himself. A subplot in Morning Glory fits this mold similarly.

Another related note. The character playing Jake Gyllenhaal’s brother is clearly the poor man’s Jonah Hill. His every idiosyncrasy was inspired by Hill, along with his appearance. His character, too, takes a little journey of discovery, coming to the conclusion that the free sex he’s been wanting his whole life is dust in the wind. He decides he should go back to his wife and work things out. The fact that he learned this lesson at an orgiastic “pajama party” is ironic. All of this seems to indicate that the cultural assumptions and commonplaces that help compose film formulas and clichés are much more informed by traditional moral values than most would realize.

Quickies, Vol. XXVI

The Red Shoes (dir. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1948) – This was awhile ago, but it begs mentioning. A beautiful, nearly sublime film that only early Technicolor could produce. Films about art that still maintain a concern for the inner political machinations and ramifications of art demand attention. They don’t pretend to transcend, and in so doing they wind up utterly transcendent. The portrayal of theater nearly suggests that theater existed for centuries – millennia – simply to preface what it would look like cinematically. Put them both together and they give birth to something that neither on its own could approach.

Breathless (dir. Jim McBride, 1983) – Although it’s been just long enough to warrant a revisit to Godard’s “original” (something about calling Godard “original” is always slightly ironic), took in the American remake instead. Expectations were low, so when this one offered some really remarkable bits, pieces, and overall product, apologies were in order. This belongs with the “best” of the L.A. films. Los Angeles dominates everything about it and is used adeptly as a catalyst that drives the narrative. Also, cinema. They make love behind the giant screen, with Gun Crazy‘s own love scene in the background. They aren’t cinephiles, exactly, but this is meta. At one point she stands identified with a contemporary Venus de Milo mural. It, like the film, is a scribbling over something classic and established. This is permissible, since that’s all Godard was doing in the first place. The films plays with the gaze, attempting to offer a more balanced take on the typical assumed male spectator. Richard Gere is objectified sexually, although so is Valerie Kaprisky. Still, shots of her are complex, offering subjective access rather than just candy for the male viewer’s enjoyment.

Blow Out (dir. Brian DePalma, 1981) – Like the above Breathless, here’s another free-standing gem that rips heavily but shamelessly off European art house cinema from the sixties. Blow-Up was Antonioni’s look at surveillance and all its implications regarding reality, or the lack thereof. DePalma’s version works off of Antonioni’s, along with Coppola’s The Conversation, but with a more realist narrative conclusion. It may not be feel-good, but it’s geared more toward audience expectations and pleasure. That’s to say, Travolta doesn’t disappear on a green in the last shot as Hemmings does in Blow-Up, and he doesn’t return to a primal, womb-like stage like Hackman does in the last shot of The Conversation.

Revolver (dir. Guy Ritchie, 2005) – This was marketed as Ritchie’s return to form, following his dabbling in the remake business and featuring his wife Madonna as the main star (Swept Away). In Revolver, he’s trying to have his cake and eat it too. Going for maximum entertainment value, the film also wallows in its refusal to give any clear-cut answers. Reminds one of the description of Lucille Bluth in Arrested Development: “She gets off on being withholding.” Once the film wraps up, Ritchie enlists various psychologists and university profs to explain the mental phenomenon underlying the film’s narrative uncertainty during the closing credits. Whatever. Using this sort of thing as an instrument to a greater end is one thing, but it comes off as highly pretentious. Hitchcock had a way of giving the audience enough to work with while maintaining suspense, but films like Revolver put off the distinct vibe of being better than their audience. Ritchie confirms this in an interview, acknowledging that they cut out a lot of material that would have shed more light on the nature of the plot.

The Great Dictator (dir. Charlie Chaplin, 1940) – Embarrassed not to have seen it earlier, but at least it’s now happened. Quite a fascinating Prince and the Pauper story set in WWII, mostly because of Chaplin’s suggestion of Hitler’s humanity. Of course, he later said he wouldn’t have made the film if he’d known about the nature of the Holocaust. The most interesting scene has to be when Hinkel plays with the balloon-globe privately in his nest of an office. There’s something wickedly beautiful, almost transcendent, about the image. Chaplin is a self-described fool, so when he portrays a Hitler-esque dictator, he comes across as a naughty child who is so self-obsessed (as children tend to be) as not to consider the realities going on based on his ruthless orders.

Morning Glory (dir. Roger Michell, 2010) – Wow, just awful. This one sticks to the formula like it’s got nothing else to offer, which it doesn’t. Harrison Ford seems just as scotch-drunk here as he did on Conan a couple weeks ago. Rachel McAdams’ character, to which the viewer is sutured, is a workaholic whose outlook on life is completely superficial, and that is applauded at least or assumed normal at best. The obligatory unemployed montage is an insensitive insertion in an era of massive unemployment. It’s another movie that tells us: you can be the very best, if you only work hard enough, and once you get to the top, you realize how only then can you take a breather and enjoy life a little.