A Bigger Splash (2015) direted by Luca Gaudigno is like his superior I Am Love an exploration of the lives of people with too much time on their hands. Splash is much, much slighter, a mere improvisation with a premise of stunning predictability.
Of course, that is probably immaterial to Mr. Guadigno. We Americans preach narrative economy above all, and drive headlong from story point to story point. Texture is just for cinematographers or post-production sound mixers. But like most European filmmakers, Mr. Guadigno is not afraid to slow down and let the rhythms of life flow by, which makes this film about 20-25 minutes longer than it would be under an American film director.
And then you would have lost one of the strangest and most interesting grace notes of the film. I hope it's not too much of a spoiler to learn that one of the four principal characters pictured above dies in a pool before the film is over. In an American picture, we would barrel ahead to the interrogations, the unanswered questions, the betrayals, etc., etc. But we are in Italy, and this is a rented house. And the film takes its time to show just how unpleasant and uncomfortable it would be to have someone die in the pool of your beautiful rented villa in Italy. The uniformed policemen come and put up some very tatty crime scene tape. Then the pool must be emptied, and that takes time. A lot of time. Time enough that one can go down to the police station and back and it's still not quite done and the body has still not been extricated. The whole matter is just ugly and nasty and even if the dead person in the pool wasn't close to you, it still would throw an awful shadow over your vacation, as if someone had thrown sewage into the wine barrels.
I don't think many American filmmakers would have stopped to note that. They want to focus on who and how and how that makes the protagonists feel, but that approach would have missed the comical upbeat at the end of the movie, in which the police chief insists on getting an autograph from vacationing rock star Tilda Swinton in the middle of an absolute downpour. Does that explain anything? No, but it helps make A Bigger Splash just a bit more special than it would have been.
This post is by a suspiciously similarly-named author, Samantha Lockhart, 2010 graduate of the College of William and Mary, environmental activist and organizer and former member of my household. Following are her thoughts on a childhood favorite, the Fred Astaire - Audrey Hepburn musical Funny Face (1957).
Contrasting career choices in Funny Face
FUNNY FACE
It is a special experience to rewatch a film that was a favorite as a child, but which you have rarely seen since. It brings this feeling of comfortable familiarity – like you both know and don’t know what’s about to happen next. Like having a recurring dream or watching a new M. Night Shyamalan movie.
Often, it means noticing things that you did not see as a child either because your innocence shielded you from it, or simply because you could not have gotten the reference without the social vocabulary that only a liberal arts education can provide. But for me, and others like me, who grew up watching movies all the time; for those that were raised in part by film and whose life was chronicled in large part by the movies that populated each phase – rewatching these formative movies means so much more. It’s like finding the pieces of the puzzle that make you who you are today. Suddenly, you make sense to yourself in some small but important manner. Like tracing your heritage and discovering your ancestral routes, it is an exercise which can help to show a clearer roadmap that has somehow helped determine fundamental things about the course of your life, your ambitions and your dreams.
Some of this has always been obvious to me, because the watching coincided so closely with my own consciousness of growing-up and self-discovery. I always knew that The West Wing was a huge part of why I was interested in politics. That was never a mystery that needed solving, that puzzle piece always fit for me squarely on Wednesday evenings at 9pm on NBC from ages 11 to 17. But the stuff I watched when I was far too young to notice its impact or to remember it – rewatching those films can be incredibly revealing. Sometimes it’s in small ways, like realizing that the reason that every time I have only one high heel on, I have the urge to say “Look! I was born on the side of a hill” has something to do with Bringing Up Baby or that every time I wish I was invisible I still shimmy goofily with my arms up because of Time of Their Lives. But sometimes, the marks that these films leave can reveal themselves to be oddly profound.
Funny Face was one of my favorite movies as a kid, before Fred Astaire’s complete lack of sex appeal bothered to detract from the romance of it. I remembered most vividly how stunningly beautiful the film is, filled with soft lighting contrasted with sharp, vivid colors that frame Audrey’s stunning face – the true star of the film, but somehow I had forgotten almost everything else. Yet as I watched it, somehow I found myself knowing every word. One of the tests out there of whether a film has a feminist edge is whether two women ever have a conversation about something other than a man. Well, Funny Face opens with a scene from a powerful, smart, sophisticated female editor of a major magazine talking to her staff of smart women. True, they’re talking about the color pink, but somehow it doesn’t matter.
Pink=ORDINARY
And the opening number "Think Pink"ends with an hilarious and somewhat empowering moment in which someone asks the fashion editor, Maggie, why she is the only one not in pink, to which she replies “I wouldn’t be caught dead” and walks away in a chic gray suit. What I love about this is that Maggie is admitting that she is a marketing genius who has manipulated women across the country to like whatever she tells them to like. Right off the bat, this character means more to me than I ever recognized at the time. Her success is not tied to a man, she is decisive, smart, elegant, sophisticated, wise – and she refuses to wear pink. I have obstinately refused to wear pink since the age of 4. I have always associated it with profound mediocrity. I am obsessed with black and grey. Maggie is extraordinary, and she would not be caught dead.
Modeling=DUMB.
Jo – a boy’s shortening of what is assumed to be a longer girl’s name (Joanne? Josephine?), much like mine – Sam - is smart and never thinks of herself as being beautiful. She finds fashion and modeling trivial and stupid. I was a very cute kid. I was more than cute – I was a stunning little girl. I’m not saying that to be obnoxious, it’s just true. I don’t think I measure up now nearly as well. At the age of four of five, however, I could barely go anywhere without someone asking my parents if I was interested in modeling to which I replied a vehement “NO.” My mother was confused. She had been a dancer and actress and occasional model, had no moral objection to the venture that she could have passed onto her young daughter. My parents were in financial straits and a little modeling money probably would not have hurt, but no one was going to make me do anything I didn’t’ want to do and I did NOT want to model. I perceived modeling as being trivial and stupid. Of course, I believe that I was too young to appreciate the emotional transformation that Jo undergoes, feeling by the end of the film that modeling could be art, could be glamorous, could help her find the man she loves and could get her a ticket to fulfill her philosophic dreams. HOWEVER, I do think that I picked up on some other things about Jo.
Sticking to your guns
For one thing – Jo has very strong principles that center around this concept of empathy. She works in a bookstore in Greenwich Village and worships a philosopher in France. Though she finds herself falling in love with drama and glamour of the fashion world through Dick, she does not lose herself to it. Dick believes that once she has fallen in love with him, it means he “has” her. She has entered his world and left her own. She does not see it this way and gets angry with him, essentially ending the relationship by saying that they are “too fundamentally different” to be together. She talks a lot about the importance of her principles which Dick seems to make fun of. She is willing to give up on her budding relationship before she would give up on what she believes in. I think this lesson hit home with me and has given me solid footing on the otherwise rocky terrain of love.
Don’t Rescue Me
Dick’s condescending insistence that he knows better serves only to anger Jo. Rather than let him fight her battles, she fights her own. From getting the last word (or dance) in the café following Dick’s attempts to embarrass her to hitting Professor Flostre over the head with a statue – she can take care of herself. I’ve always been a fan of fighting my own battles, paying my own way, and living my own life and was known to yell at Gaston during Beauty and the Beast “When a lady says NO, she meeeaaans NO!” And while studying abroad in India during college, threatened and shouted obscenities at the Indian men who made lude assumptions about Western Women.
Ya gotta be happy.
But the final and perhaps most important lesson from Funny Face is “On how to be lovely, you gotta be happy.” This marks the second time in the film in which women interact together in a burst of YaYa level female empowerment! Maggie, the magazine editor, teaches Jo how to talk to the press about herself and provides a significant lesson. In order to be beautiful, like Audrey Hepburn, you have to be joyful. I have finally learned that my overwhelmingly positive and unflinchingly optimistic disposition can all be traced back to a profound and fundamental vanity.
But…really?
Of course – I see in this film what I believe I saw then at age four or five. I am following the interpretation that seems most familiar to me, like finding your way home when lost based on sheer instinct. Were I to watch this film with completely fresh eyes, I may also point out that Dick is incredibly condescending about Jo’s philosophy and even says of Flostre “he has as much interest in your intelligence as I have” indicating, of course, very little. Yet Jo, this incredibly beautiful, young, brilliant, principled, woman still ends up with Dick – the condescending photographer with no interest in her intelligence. I could note that while Maggie is a successful female figure, she also appears to be unmarried and after all, is successful in the field of “fashion” – one typically assigned to women anyway. I could choose to highlight that Professor Flostre does turn out to be a fraud and only after Jo for romantic reasons, as if to indicate that Dick was right all along and all Jo needed was a good man to show her the way.
So perhaps it is a chicken and egg situation – maybe I was always a strong and principled girl and the parts of this film that spoke to that in me were the ones that I chose to listen to. But whether it was me looking for a story and female figures to help more sharply define characteristics I already had or it was me building myself from scratch from the lessons taught by these films, it hardly seems to matter. Either way, I hate pink.
Wanderlust (2012), which is a pretty uneven
entertainment, is interesting mostly as another bid for mainstream
success by members of the sketch comedy group The State,
whose heyday was 20 years ago. Given that the group had 11 members,
it is not surprising that they have divided into various writing and
performing teams, many with overlapping membership. Of all these
groupings, the most successful in the movie business has been the
screenplay team of Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant, the moving forces
behind the relentlessly unfunny Reno 911
and creators of the almost-as-unamusing Night in the Museum
series (the entertainment value of which is almostly entirely derived
from the odd-couple teaming of Dick Van Dyke and Mickey Rooney).
Lennon and Garant are also engaged to “punch up” other writers
scripts and have even published a book on how to sell out and write
crappy Hollywood movies.
Director
and co-writer David Wain and co-writer and actor Ken Marino have done
the most to keep the anarchic spirit of The State
alive, progressing from the episodic cult hit Wet Hot
American Summer through the
sketch comedy The Ten
(of which I am,as far as I can find, the world's only fan although I
think less than half of the movie works) to the mentorship of Judd
Apatow, who sponsored Wain and Marino's Role Models,
which made enough money to make Universal ask for another film from
the Wain-Marino team, again under the Apatow aegis.
Whereas
Lennon-Garant have mastered Hollywood formulas well enough to vomit
them back up between the covers of a book, Wain and Marino still have
to graft stray bits of stories from other movies onto their sketch
ideas in order to get their 90 minutes of entertainment to resemble a
movie. Most egregiously in Wanderlust,
they manufacture a crisis for the entire cast of characters very late
in the second act without a scrap of foreshadowing, then dismiss it
with the airiest of deus ex machinas,
almost as if to acknowledge that narrative is a stupid waste of time
in their eyes. From interviews with the creators, it is evident that
they write by proceeding from ideas and concepts rather than
characters, a procedure which is painfully obvious in the finished
work.
Moreover,
when it comes to the jokes, Wain and Marino veer rapidly from
drastically overstating and repeating their jokes to throwing them
away so as to be almost invisible. Endless amounts of time are spent
on toilets in this movie, with little additional comic effect after
the first statement of the joke. On the other hand, one of the best
laughs in the film is invisible as Justin Theroux dismisses Paul
Rudd's categorization of his group as a “commune.” “Communes”
he scoffs, just means “hippies smoking pot and playing guitars”
as he leans against a doorway through which we see and hear a room
full of hippies smoking pot and playing guitars. There is no cut-in,
no take, no signal to the audience that there has been a joke, which
is admirable, but perhaps self-defeating.
The
single best comic performance (other than Alan Alda, who gets better
and better at kidding his own persona) is by the film's editors, David Moritz and David Nassau who create and improve innumberable jokes with some
superb cuts and juxtapositions. In fact, the very first out-loud laugh in the film involves the cut into the title card itself.
The question remains as to whether Wain and Marino will ever successfully fuse their sketch-oriented form of humor, based on wildly exaggerated characters and an improvisatory freedom with a real story in which real characters wrestle with real stakes. In The Silent Clowns, Walter Kerr described Harold Lloyd as an "architect of sympathy," building the gags in his films into a narrative structure that virtually forced the audience to feel for the main character and want his dreams to be realized. What made Lloyd (and Chaplin and Keaton) great is that the narrative push in their best films was not imported from exterior sources but grew up out of the characters and the visual comedy they were prone to, given the quirks and proclivities of those characters. Character, narrative and gag were all fused, rather than being pasted together. That takes a lot of time and a lot of films (Lloyd may have made 100 short comedies before arriving at the character who made him great.) I hope Mr. Wain and Mr. Marino have the opportunity and the ability to realize that fusion.
The title of the post is, of course, that great line Buck Henry wrote for himself to deliver in The Graduate. And of course, Benjamin IS there for an affair.
Mademoiselle Chambon (2009), on the other hand, demonstrates that when one is out to make a romantic film, it is all-or-nothing. Dithering one's way in and out of a relationship may be realistic, but it is hardly diverting or enlightening. Noel Coward's lovers in Brief Encounter may have been English and talkative diffident and shy, but they were clearly and demonstratively and knowingly in a relationship, conflicted as they may have been and uncertain as to how they should proceed. The lovers in Chambon don't seem to be able to figure out what they're doing at all.
It is possible to make films, even great films, driven by things other than classical dramatic narrative structure. There are character portraits, explorations of environments or communities. But you can't set a story on the knife edge of a binary choice--will-they-or-won't-they?--and leave it there for 100 minutes and engage an audience. Or at least you'd have to be a greater artist than writer-director Stephane Brize.
At least Lean and Coward knew how to sustain the tension. The affair remained unconsummated, although they did go to an apartment which Billy Wilder transmogrified into The Apartment. In Chambon, the lovers go to bed but it is the audience that his put to sleep. The encounter answers no questions, reveals no information, accomplishes nothing.
There is literally one interesting cinematic moment in Chambon, and you've seen it in other films, although actress Aure Autike as the wife in the middle, executes it perfectly. We are at a little garden party, Mlle Chambon has been invited to play her violin, and she plays a piece of particular significance to her and her lover, Jean. Jean, who has been established as a rather uncultured and inarticulate character (another problem with the film) is absolutely gobsmacked. His jaw goes slack and his eyes go all gooey like a character in a P.G. Wodehouse novel. But the way the wife sees it and makes the connection is quite wonderful, silent-film-style storytelling, and represents the one interesting moment that is not a pale shadow of Brief Encounter.
As a film buff, I can't help feeling your time would be better spent renting or buying the Criterion edition of Brief Encounter, rather than bothering with Mlle Chambon or even continuing to read this blog. Go! Now!
If nothing else, Shame (2011) all by itself justifies digital filmmaking. I daresay the film would be impossible by any other means, with Sean Bobbit's camera gliding smoothly as it does over the surfaces of the Manhattan night, resting for long, long takes which measure the vast distances between people, even people who have known each other well. A cut, even to come closer to the faces would disturb the frost as it grows up between the isolated figures on the screen. The camera is rock-solid steady. I would bet there was not a handheld shot in the film -- if there was, it didn't call attention to itself.
This has to rank as one of the chilliest films ever made about sex, bathed in a bottle-green palette, and frequently accompanied by Glenn Gould's recording of The Goldberg Variations.
Moreover, the Brits who made this film, including director Steve McQueen and actors Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan are using New York not as an environment, as a native filmmaker does, but as a location; a location to be explored like the caves of Lascaux, both quaint and dangerous. It's OK that Fassbender and Mulligan not completely convincing Americans -- it's like those movies where you can tell they're speaking German because they have a German accent.
Perhaps most interesting is how the film keeps moving without an appranet narrative engine. Nobody has anything they need to accomplish in a set period of time. Nobody is looking to change, although Mulligan's character would probably like to get her own apartment and a steady gig. Fassbender does not bottom out. He does not go into treatment, or fail in treatment.
I would argue that, the title notwithstanding, there is no evidence that the character does feel shame. A little self-hatred, a sense that what he's doing isn't working, a fear of getting caught. But no sense that Fassbender can or wants to do anything about his addiction. Not even after getting a beating.
It's really not a movie. It's a snapshot. But just as the young woman at the bar, who has come with her boyfriend, stares rapt at Fassbender's lewd proposition like a mouse staring at a snake, we can't take our eyes off the thing the protagonist has become, a thing which sheds the characteristics of a human being as the film progresses until it (he) has no reason to live other than the next pointless encounter, like a shark endlessly swimming in search of prey. And a shark's life doesn't have to have meaning.
They really could have titled this movie Dead Man F******.
I don't remember whether it was on the commentary track or in a separate interview, but I remember Jeffrey Jones, commenting on his highly costumed and bewigged appearance in Sleepy Hollow, that he had decided to use an acting technique he had learned as the Emperor in Amadeus: "Let the wig do the acting." It was a joke, but his point was that, if you really look like you're from the 17th century, you don't have to "act" 17th century-ish. The audience will have enough to go on to place you and you can go about your business creating the character.
And although two very fine actors, Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortensen are portraying two titans in medical history, respectively Jung and Freud in the film A Dangerous Method (2011), they are all upstaged by Keira Knightley's teeth. Actually, Ms. Knightley is quite upstaged by her own teeth.
Evidently the storm has passed.
In her defense, Ms. Knightley is re-enacting contemporary recountings of a female affliction called "hysteria," which means "my woman parts are making me crazy." It's fairly unusual for an actor to have to conduct historical research to reproduce the systems of a disease. And dis-ease -- lack of comfort in one's own skin -- is what it truly consists of.
As you might glean from these stills, her performance is not without risks. As with any film directed by David Cronenberg, the entire film embraces risk; perhaps the greatest is that it makes the famous and once-controversial Freud a cautious, almost colorless character, and, most surprisingly, in the person of Viggo Mortensen, who gave Cronenberg such memorably dangerous performances in A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, films which, if you have not seen them, I strongly urge you to seek out. Knightley is the whole show here in one of the most theatrical, non-cinematic performances anyone has gotten away with in the last few years. It is a little hard to believe that a young woman of her era could discuss her own sexual problems in such a calm and clinical way, but the indicators are that this is true and that the woman in question, Sabina Speilrein, was a successful pioneering therapist in her own right.
Speaking of theatrical, the film runs toward long takes of dialogue -- I can't think of a Cronenberg film with so little overt physical action. But it is hardly surprising as the screenwriter is the playwright Christopher Hampton, one of the wordiest of wordsmiths, given to adaptations and therefore has a bit of the pedant built into his writing as a matter of course; moreover the script was from a play adapted from a script. No matter how you dress it up, this is a movie about people talking in rooms.
Except when they're spanking each other, which is probably why this film didn't attract the Merchant-Ivory fan base for very polite historical psychological drama. It's neither completely genteel nor utterly grotesque like a film by Peter Greenaway. Too dull for the shock fans, too raw for the Masterpiece Theatre crowd.
But if this is a harbinger of things to come from Ms. Knightley, who seems to have been justified in leaving the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, her future looks not only interesting, but rather brave.
"...I said I'd make a woman and indeed I did," sings Henry Higgins in a reprise of "You Did It" (cutting off the song "Without You") late in the second act of My Fair Lady. In that context, it was just an obnoxious solipsistic way of dismissing a woman's claim of self-sufficiency, by merely claiming that he had always wanted the woman to be assertive and independent, while in fact he could not tolerate anyone of any gender not bowing to his whim.
In short, it was meant to be funny and it was.
It's not funny and not meant to be in The Skin I Live In (2011) the creepiest and most perverse variation of the Pygmalion myth I've experienced (leaving aside straight-out horror movies, which are usually intentionally risible). To use a phrase I loath, "SPOILER ALERT." (I don't bother with this idea because (a) the concept of this blog is to have a conversation with the reader about films, not to review them, and respecting the distributor's marketing plans is not part of the agenda here; and (b) because the idea that the main interest in the narrative is the surprise in being caught up with the twists and turns is a 20th and 21st century perversion of the ancient art of storytelling, which consisted in keeping the listener rapt EVEN THOUGH the listener knew the story, knew all the stories, and wanted to see what you do with it.)
(Continuing this exegesis -- theatergoers do not want Hamlet to come out all different and surprising, and do not want their Mozart piano concertos to have trick endings. These sorts of demands for endless novelty are, I maintain, MARKETING considerations, NOT artistic ones. And there is research to show that people enjoy stories better when they already know the ending. More of this in my next post.)
Luckily, Almodovar understands at the deeper level what he's doing. The story, which is appalling as any Greek myth, tells of a man who mourns his dead wife by converting his hysterical and suicidal daughter's rapist into a fireproof replica of her. Take that, Medea! Represent, Oedipus! Clearly this is not meant to be accepted as events that could have actually happened at any real time in any real place. Almodovar signals this with the make-believe production design -- all solid colors, mostly primary, surfaces unblemished, a kitchen with no mark of ever having been used, a lecture hall that looks like it was completed minutes before shooting. There are no signs or indicators of real life here, of the quotidian details of existence. This is the stuff of myth, which is the only way Almodovar could get away with it (if only he did).
Two other observations and I think I'm done. One is that the entire first half hour and the double meaning of the title are virtually a red-herring. Much footage is devoted to the perfection of flame-proof skin, presumably as a reaction to the protagonist's wife's terrible death in a flaming car accident. But that ultimately is of no consequence. That gun that Almodovar puts in the drawer in the first act is never taken out again. The experimental subject never encounters potential injury by fire, fire is no part of the plot. Frankly, the details of gender-reassignment are of far more significance. And when Banderas's boss tells him to stop this line of experimentation, he does, without complaint and without secretly carrying on, like any decent self-respecting mad scientist.
Yes, the title is there because of what the characters do, the guilt they bear, the burdens they carry, all the questions of identity that such a title raises. But the double meaning it reaches for is by way of a cheat, of a plot situation that is simply grafted onto the story. That really should have been re-thought.
Finally, I have no idea what Banderas is doing in this movie, other than that he has a history with Almodovar, they helped build each other's careers and there must be a sense of mutual obligation. Because he is clearly miscast. What Banderas does is contained fury. That's his brand. The script calls for contained madness, a note not within Banderas's range. There is never a thing to suggest to irrational, or even really the dangerous quality of this character. In an effort to contain the insanity of the story, Banderas exhibits a calm impassivity which registers as indifference, especially when he casually abandons the experimentation that is supposed to be the premise of the film. Banderas's face does not yet have the visual complexity to convey two thoughts at once (compared to, for instance, an Anthony Hopkins or a Kevin Spacey), so for most of the film he seems to be merely obeying the script's dictates, without any conviction that there's anything to them.
Almodovar has always wanted to marry insightful drama with scenes of revulsion and horror, but backed to the wall on this film, he seems to have settled for the latter. Pity the better film lying just under the skin of this one.
Somebody tell Errol Morris that somebody who saw a couple of movies made a cheesy imitation of a documentary, stuck Errol's name on it and called it Tabloid (2010).
Mr. Morris has two basic modes. In one he puts two people or groups of people championing competing stories in front of the camera, lets them tell their stories and gently leads the viewer toward the most plausible version of events, sometimes with the aid of carefully identified reeactments, stock footage and shots of artifacts and locations. In the other mode, he lets amiably odd people ramble on about their fixations, and we are invited to think, "Aren't these eccentrics charming? Well, it takes all kinds to make a world." There is no "other side of the story" in such cases -- the whole story is the wacky things these loveable people believe.
Tabloid botches the whole thing. An idiot-maniac is permitted to drivel on in front of the camera at length with a story so silly and distasteful that you will have to watch the film at home, near a shower or bathtub. No other perspective is offered, other than the so-called journalists who profited from spreading her delusions across the countryside. So there is none of the interesting tension of conflicting versions of the story. We get one, solitary, unitary deranged rendition of a deranged set of facts.
There are small Errol Morris flourishes -- big animated words on the screen, mock-ironic stock footage spliced in, real footage of the subject of the film (you notice how I avoid repeating her name) 35 years ago, younger and slimmer and just as crazy if not crazier.
If your idea of art or entertainment is being locked in a small room with a nut, have at it. Include me out, thank you.
Forget five years -- 124 minutes! There's a reason that romantic comedies, which The Five-Year Engagement (2012) is not, uniformly last 90 to 100 minutes. The ground has been covered, no matter what it is, and once the audience has sussed out your new twist or gimmick, it's your obligation to get off the stage as quickly and entertainingly possible.
But, as previously asserted, TFYE is not a romantic comedy. At times it is only a comedy the way Uncle Vanya is a comedy, which is one reason I regret it was directed by the crass Nicholas Stoller, whose last credit, Get Him To The Greek , was dedicated to the proposition that there is nothing funnier than Jonah Hill's butt crack. Moreover, Mr. Stoller and Mr. Segal seemed to be so busy acting and directing that they did not notice the fairly easy cut they could have made which would have lopped off 20-25 minutes to this film and substantially improved it.
(The cut I mean is to go from Jason Segal's character learning that his fiancee has kissed her boss straight to Segal returning to San Francisco. That would have omitted the disgusting attempted adultery-with-condiments scene and the disgusting frostbitten toe. The Apatow crowd seems to be stuck in the pubescent phase of confusing bodily fluids and food plus a fascination with bodily mutilation.)
On the other hand, Segal and Stoller have to be applauded for trying to make something different and better, even if they didn't succeed. The idea is that relationships are hard and don't match ideals, that we fail and fall short and we still love each other. Not new, but needs to be repeated for each generation.
Because TFYE is really, at heart, an example of what art historian Stanley Cavell termed the "comedy of remarriage" of which Noel Coward's Private Lives is the modern progenitor. (Cavell finds its roots in Shakespearean comedy.) In TFYE, the break-up and reunion happen in the context of an engagement, rather than requiring divorce and remarriage, but that is merely a function of changing social customs and movie censorship. The principal is the same. Unblemished happiness cannot survive, will not survive. The characters must be tempered, must be chastened, punished perhaps (maybe that's why the frostbite) so that they may learn. It might even be considered a comedy of lessons.
What makes TFYE disconcerting is that whereas Coward masks his character's pain in badinage with only the briefest of lapses revealing the truth, the characters in Segal & Stoller's script talk the way real couples having real trouble really talk. Which is fine, except for the sort of style problems raised when such material is in juxtaposition with the Apatow brand of not just fall-on-your-prat humor, but fall-on-your-prat-in-poo-three-times-over humor.
That said, I laughed not infrequently and there is one Hall of Fame scene between Emily Blunt and Alison Brie. They are arguing about the long engagement and marriage in front of a young child, and have therefore adopted (rather poor) imitations of Elmo and Cookie Monster, respectively to conduct the argument, which concludes, "'C' is for condom!"
One other odd element -- the cinematography of Javier Aguirresarobe, who not only has never shot a comedy before, but is responsible for some very dark horror films and thrillers (The Road, The Others, some of the Twilight films). TFYE looked very dark, with many rollicking comedy scenes in half-shadow and the comic violence invoked real terror and pain. Now the fact is, I saw the film in my neighborhood theater, which is a little old and shabby, and it just may have been that the projector bulb was dim and that the film is very bright and cuddly and cheerful. But honestly, when a comedy film's characters get depressed, should you be just as depressed as well? I sure was.
Easy A (2010) sets out to be a modern gloss on The Scarlet Letter in which a woman who is actually a victim becomes an outcast for her presumed audacity; whereas the film actually corresponds more closely to another fictional work about Puritan New England, The Crucible, about the importance of honoring the truth, and the value of preserving one's good name.
It is also an hommage to the 80s teen comedies it explicitly references, especially in that the very prospect of a girl acknowledging having had sex causes a sensation throughout the school. I cannot imagine the high school in the United States in 2011 where this would be a sensation, nevertheless it is an essential premise of this story, without which nothing would follow. In fact, the entire film takes place in a strange make-believe world, which is probably what makes some unpalatable ideas tolerable.
Happily, this make-believe world is populated with superbly funny supporting character actors whose presence is clearly aimed at moviegoers older than the apparent intended audience. It is difficult to conceive that the lovable, affable hippies played by Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson could have raised such a well-balanced character as Olive, but it is an attractive fantasy. (One wonders about the non-intuitive pairing of Tucci and Clarkson, who exhibit flawless teamwork until one learns that they are longtime close friends.) Thomas Haden Church, who used to excel at playing obnoxious jerks is here admirable, not least for the fact that his character behaves as if he was a jerk, not acknowledging how caring and funny he is. And Lisa Kudrow deserves a medal for consistently not giving a damn about her "image" and seeking out the interesting roles.
Finally, there is Dan Byrd, who has emerged from the mill of TV sitcoms and here lends an unexpected depth of emotion to what begins as a farcical solution to a farcical problem. As is typical for these films, the high-schoolers look old enough to be delivering their doctoral dissertations--one of them is actually identified as being 22, but he is hardly the oldest-looking "student" around. Some day someone will make a high school movie with 16-year-olds and the universe will probably implode.
But Easy A's greatest accomplishment is to have made a teen sex comedy without any sex, which brings me back to my initial point -- the story is about names, the names you're given and the name you make for yourself. At the outset, our heroine is Olive because she believes she is drab. Her girl friend is Rhiannon, a name nobody heard of until some celebrity turned up with that made-up concoction. Her gay friend is Brandon, who has both been "branded", that is, marked as gay (and therefore outcast), but also might turn out to be Brando, both a great actor and a celebrity (and leaves Ojai to find out). Her object of desire is not like other high school boys; although handsome, he is (T)odd. So I only wish that Olive, instead of adopting Hester Prynne's "A" which she has not in fact earned, had at the end, when she decides to start telling the truth about who and what she is had only repeated the words of John Proctor, who upon being asked why he will not sign his name to a false confession, thought it could save his life, tells his judge:
Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!
[My daughter praised the film for being an accurate reflection of what it is like to be an under-estimated over-achiever, the kind of girl whose accomplishments and good sense are so taken for granted that she can inadvertently be given the latitude to make the kind of serious mistakes that more average kids may never have. And such a person's abilities are taken for granted, his or her judgment may be over-estimated -- thus, they can find themselves over their heads without a real confidant or mentor to be relied on to dig themselves out.]
I was reminded of another sexless sex comedy based on a lie. Marriage Italian Style (1965) is a terrible title (meant to remind filmgoers of a prior success, Divorce Italian Style) for an adaptation of a classic of the Italian stage, Filumena Marturano. The story begins with a lie: Domenico's long-time mistress, Filumena is dying, and he needs to marry her before she expires and goes to hell. The marriage proceeds, the deception revealed and Domenico is furious, and seeks an annulment on the basis of deception. This is the reverse of Easy A -- Filumena is being denied the name "Signora Soriano" although she is clearly entitled to it. She runs his household, keeps the books for his businesses, and, unbeknownst to him raised the son she had by him, along with two other sons by other men. Ostensibly, Domenico will not marry her because he wants to marry his younger girlfriend, but what that really means is that Filumena HAS already become The Wife -- the undesirable but indispensable life partner whose loyalty a man hopes to purchase at the lowest price possible -- even nothing, not even affection. (One wonders if the Latin man has a problem with this because he has been conditioned to love the woman who cannot be desired The Mother. Once The Wife becomes a Mother, either to one's children or to oneself, she is, by definition, undesirable.)
It is interesting to see Sophia Loren at this relatively early stage in her career (about 10 years as a star with 45 to follow--so far) playing the cast-off, the discarded woman; although of course, she is quite able to play the desirable young trollop in the flashback scenes. And Mastroianni was always the master of spiritual weariness. What is particularly striking is Domenico's odd formality with the three young men, any of whom might be his son. What frightens him and prevents him from showing genuine warmth is not the fear that they will make demands of him, but that he will feel attachment and need for his son -- or worse, for all of Filumena's sons. The fact that none of them want his money confirms it. Domenico cannot relate to a family member who is not a supplicant; and one who may give him something he can't admit needing: love and respect.
The film is not afraid to be abrasive, to make both Domenico and Filumena seem cruel at times, and one wonders what sharper, harsher directions Easy A could have gone in; a different set of parents, a girl with less sense of self. A girl who could let herself be victimized until the day...
I think it was Frank Langella's fault. Vampires had been minding their own business, in sort of semi-retirement in the 50s, 60s and 70s, when Bela Lugosi was a campy joke. Then along comes Frank Langella in a Broadway revival of the play version of Dracula in the fall of 1977 and instead of foreign and creepy, he's tall, handsome and seductive. (Don't consult the film version of that production--it's an unfocused mess.)
Soon everybody goes wacky for vampires, especially Anne Rice, who starts making up new rules for vampires and even starts changing the rules. Well, then it was Katy-bar-the-door, anything goes and now we have got vampires walking around in broad daylight being sparkly. Bleeachh! The word vampire has lost any fixed meaning anymore, which might be why people interested in real thrills have migrated over to zombies and werewolves.
In fact the family of mutant redneck vampires in Near Dark (1987). To its credit, its only meant to be fast, cheap fun-genre flick, so there are only three or four things you need to know about Near Dark. First, it's directed by Kathryn Bigelow of Hurt Locker fame, who specializes in stories about people who bond due to their isolation and even ostracism. She can be fearless this way, even daring to make a film about the most disgusting and repellent outcasts in our society, surfers. Second, Near Dark is a festival for those people of the age group to be nostalgic about 80s films. It has the bad hair, bad clothes and bad music that were endemic to the era. There are people who enjoy such things. There are also people who set fire to their pets.
Third, it's one of the earliest films I can remember that suggests that a vampire might be your cool boyfriend. Dracula was never going to be your boyfriend. A hot one-night stand, sure, but never your steady, who lives in the house over the next block. I wonder if Stephanie Meyer, who was 14 when this film came out, wasn't permanently warped by it. Fourth, it is the only vampire movie I know of where somebody got un-vampired. Sure, Mina in Dracula got part-vampired, but they saved her before she went all the way. Adrian Pasdar gets all better, which suggests that vampirism might just be an adolescent phase, curable with a full blood transfusion. (I wonder what other adolescent phases could be cured that way.)
Fifth (did I say there were three or four things?), this is the only film I know of in which Bill Pullman ever does anything interesting in front of a camera. Up until now, I thought he possessed some version of Harry Potter's invisibility cloak, since he always seemed to disappear into the scenery behind him with his sheer mind-numbing boringness. But in Near Dark, Pullman is the mean psycho redneck in the family of rednecks, and I must admit it, he chews a pretty impressive serving of scenery. If someone makes a compilation of crazy-guy-wastes-an-entire-bar sequences, they have to include the one from this picture.
The one thing Near Dark is uninterested in is using vampires as a metaphor. They are just straight-on badasses out for a bad time, and willing to share it. Let The Right One In (2008) leans a bit more onto the metaphoric side, but wears it lightly. Where Near Dark is a romp, Let The Right One In is genuinely creepy, and unafraid to deliver one of the best horror-film come-uppances to one of the bully-villains in the history of film. (To those of you who've seen it, I'm talking about the scene in the swimming pool toward the end of the film.)
But there is, admittedly, something more on this film's mind than good clean scares. The characters are adolescent, in the very earliest stages of puberty, and all vampire stories are, to some extent, about fear of sex, and of the surrender that sex seems to require. Here we are as 12-year-olds, finally figuring out just who we are and defining our identity in contrast with the rest of the world, and now we are expected to learn how to merge our self and even our soul into that of our partner. It's not fair!
Also addressed in this film is bullying, parental neglect, wandering gender identity, being a misfit, and just how bleak and awful winter in Sweden is, especially when you live in nasty, cheaply-built, Soviet-bloc style apartments. If it were me, it would be either suicide or vampirism. It's hard to say which would be worse -- being hung upside down from a tree until all your blood runs into a jug or trying to survive the winter. A vampire attack could be sweet relief. Or at least a novelty, something to talk about until April.
It may hearten some people to know in this tough economy that there seems to be a steady position of vampire helper. Some of the story of Let The Right One In has to do with transitioning from one helper to another. A word to the wise -- you might not be gaining a new girlfriend or boyfriend -- they may just be sizing you up to become their new vampire helper. Still, for the boy in the story, it's better than being a Swedish middle schooler. (In once scene a teacher reads aloud to a class of eighth-graders from a book. When she is done, she dismisses them and they leave in a quiet and orderly fashion. There was no bell, the students were all awake and there was no backchatter from them. From this we can conclude that this is not a horror film at all but some kind of fairy-tale fantasy movie from someone's wild imagination.)
I'm kidding a lot, but the film really does cast a wonderful spell and cleverly mingles horror and sexual panic. Special effects are used sparingly but utterly convincingly, especially as we see the effects of a horrific accident with fire and the death of the vampire's first helper. Keep your eyes open during the hospital sequence. The nurse-receptionist walks outside into the winter night and we see her in the foreground and the shadowy face of the hospital in the background. Watch the background, not the foreground, and see one of the niftiest effects in the history of the genre. I stopped the disc and ran it over a few times to enjoy it.
At the end of the film, the principal characters have agreed to go on together, notwithstanding the horrors yet to come. This confirms my feeling that while Peter Pan ends as a horror story, the victim trapped perpetually as an adolescent (although this would not prevent him from running a Fortune 500 company or starting a war in a Middle Eastern country), vampire stories are (or should be) rich and truthful children's tales.
Diary Of A Lost Girl (1929) has always been treated as the lesser younger sibling of the first collaboration between director G.W. Pabst and incandescent actress Louise Brooks, Pandora's Box. And certainly, it has nothing like the light, glancing touch or the existentialist amorality of the earlier film. Diary is a melodramatic fable, of how broken families breed corruption. Nonetheless, it still has the amazing Brooks and its share of iconic images and moments. For example, if you're in a rush (and why are you reading my blog when you're in a rush?), start the video above at around 1:35. There in a luminous close-up, Brooks enjoys her first trepidatious sip of champagne (translation: illicit sex) and finds she enjoys it. There is as good an example of silent film acting as you could see. (I wish I 'd known Brooks's work during my film course last year -- I used Lon Chaney as my exemplar of silent film acting, but he is too often unreliably stagy, whereas Brooks is Pure Film.)
This close-up contains almost the entire essence of the film -- that without a real sense of identity, as provided by a circle of loving people -- putting yourself for sale in the world, as represented by literal prostitution in this case, is as good a way as any for defining yourself and obtaining power over your circumstances as any. (Especially true when your family is ready to sell you and not even let you share in the profits!)
Late silent film reached an astonishing height of efficiency, compression and expressivity. Even today, screenwriters wrestle with backstory -- how to get the information out with an elegant and organic way, rather than the manner of the housekeeper in The Real Inspector Hound: "Hello, the drawing room of Lady Muldoon's country residence one morning in early spring...I hope nothing is amiss because we are completely cut off from the world..." etc.
Look at the first few minutes of the film, which get so much information across so quickly with the minimum of titles and the maximum of facial reaction, setting out not only the facts but the social context of those facts:
The film is both more explicit about sex and more conventionally moral than Pandora's Box (could this be because it's based on an actual memoir of a "fallen woman"?), and even contains the kind of message for the audience, satirized by the play and film Chicago: "My audience loves me. And I love them. And they love me for lovin' them and I love them for lovin' me. And we love each other. And that's cause none of us got enough love in our childhoods."
Never mind. There's not much to analyze in this film, and if I continue it will be only to describe and praise the subtextual clarity and precision of its storytelling, time better spent seeking out the movie and watching it from beginning to end.
Shall We Kiss (2007) is to be applauded for rejecting a narrative bias that has become so deeply embedded in film as to go almost unnoticed. The implied answer to the title question is, of course, yes. Film and narrative prefer the road taken. And there is also an implicit assumption that new romances are preferable to old and perhaps troublesome marriages. Unless it is a film noir and a femme fatale, adultery is a good thing. Either you find a new, more suitable partner, or you return to your old partner renewed and refreshed. Perhaps filmmakers are trying to craft an argument to justify their own behavior to their spouses? Or is it that narrative wants to push characters to a place they haven't been before and where their behavior will be less predictable? (I will leave aside arguments that moral standards are breaking down because (a) this is not the blog for that sort of thing and (b) you'll find the same complaint in Plato and in Proverbs. Morals are Always Collapsing.)
Shall We Kiss bucks that inclination (pretty surprising for a French film), heading another direction by adding a layer of perspective, introduced by a storyteller and a listener. Unlike most storyteller frames, this one has something at stake -- the title question as applied to speaker and listener, and reflected in the tale being told.
This then, is a film that turns on its narrative as reflected in narration, a tool much underutilized in film today. There is a strong bias against narration in the American film industry. It is considered a crutch, a sign of weakness, of redundancy, of preference for word over picture. And used in a redundant or literary way, that position is quite right. But what such critics of narration ignore is the possibility of juxtaposing word AGAINST picture.
The narrator's voice actually precedes the introduction of synchronized sound. If one looks at the title cards of Biograph films around 1910-1911, one can read something like "Spurred by the treachery of the savage, the brave hunter exerts his utmost to preserve the sanctity of this flower of womanhood." That is, the cards often told the audience what was going to happen in the scene to follow, and is if concerned that the audience would not understand the implications thereof, would provide an overlay of both narrative and social interpretation. (Films of the era seem very anxious to assure the audience that social order, though perhaps temporarily disturbed, will be returned to its Right and Proper status. Or, as Louis Armstong replied when asked how things were, "Same as ever. White man still ahead.") From almost the inception, right through most of the Golden Era, American filmmakers did not trust the audience to get it right. If they understood the storyline, they might not understand what it MEANT. (That's why Dorothy has to tell you there's no place like home, or else you might think it's much cooler to stay in a place like Oz.)
Voice-over narration took a long time to arrive, and at first it was used to remind you that you were watching an Important Film Based on Great Literature. These kinds of films often started with a big book opening slowly, perhaps with tilt-down and dolly-in on the first page. "This is not the usual crap, folks, it's based on a real good book, and we can prove it. See, we're saying the first words of the book as you can see right here." Still, a mistrust of the audience.
But even that simple use of the voice-over opened the door to a more important idea -- the concept of distance and separation from the narrative that was about to unfold. Theater always takes place Right Now. Even if we are in ancient Athens, we are there Right Now because, see, there are the live actors right in front of us, talking right now. Film, by and large, apes that illusion. Even if the sequence of images and sounds is frozen, and we know it is, because there are films we watch over and over, the illusion is that this is all taking place in some sort of now. There is no past tense as the scenes unfold, which is probably why most synopses are written in a breathless present tense, like Damon Runyon without the baroque locutions.
Narration denies that. It says, "This is something that happened," not "this is something that is happening." At first that mode was only employed to say that this is set in the fabled past, or that this is a very important story you should know. Before long, Hollywood went Aesop and started turning stories into lessons, especially in What Not To Do. (This is always a good way to show depravity and immorality, by showing it in detail--fun, fun, fun--and then show people being punished for it. In fact, it's the basis of Cecil B. DeMille's entire career.) There was also the practical of covering time lapses and informing the audience of important changes and developments in a more efficient way than a title card (which suffers from differing reading speeds among the audience, leaving half frustrated at not being able to finish the card in time, and half bored waiting for the others to catch up.) I love the way Truffaut's unemphatic narration in Jules and Jim elides vast gaps in time, space and movements of the heart in a breathtakingly casual way, perfectly consistent with the tone and theme of the film. It's like a narrative torque wrench.
These uses of narration voice-over converged in the hard-boiled crime film (a genre that intersects with film noir), in which the detective shares his process and his outlook on the story as it unfolds. Of course, it is of the essence of the mystery story that facts and circumstances unfold in a non-chronological sequence. Thus there is the underlying narrative and the plot of the mystery laid on top -- that is, the story of how the crime is solved (and often, as in Chinatown, what the crime actually is.) The distancing effect of narration also provides room for humor, usually a wry irony only about a half-clik above sarcasm, but humor nonetheless.
This mode reaches its apogee with A Christmas Story, in which the narrator, author and screenwriter Jean Shepherd tells of epochal, earth-shattering events which are juxtaposed against scenes of an ordinary American childhood. The humor is not of mockery, but of gentle recognition that these little commonplaces feel enormous as we experience our own lives. The irony is one that we share as fellow humans, not one imposed by a sardonic author.
Emmanuel Mouret, writer-director-star of Shall We Kiss? has been compared to Eric Rohmer and Woody Allen, although neither his tone nor his visual style has much in common with either of those. Mouret sports neither nostalgia nor neuroses.* But there is the double vision of either the moralist or the humorist (natural enemies), which is the engine that makes this very slight film go. Indeed, I would argue that without the narration frame, one has little more than a minor variation of When Harry Met Sally, this one answering the central question: "can men and women be friends AND lovers?" in the negative.
(Side note - has anyone attempted a gay When Harry Met Sally? It would seem that the line between friend and lover would be even slippier when both parties share gender. Mine is an outsider's perspective, but it seems as though there might be some comic changes to be rung there. And no, I don't mean when the gay character is pathetically crushing on the straight character. That is a ridiculous straight fantasy, and in a lifetime spent in proximity with gay people, I've never known it to be happen. Being an oppressed minority makes most people pretty practical, and unlikely to waste their time chasing those who are not only unavailable, but likely to hurt you.)
The concept that the entire inner story of the film, which consumes at least 80% of its running time is told in order to explain a simple "no" offered in reply to the title question creates an unexpected suspense, i.e., will the answer change, as the telling of the story winds deep into the night, into the storyteller's hotel room, and as she assumes a semi-erotic pose while she tells the story. The fact that the listener is utterly satisfied by the story and a kiss which carries the implicit agreement to part forever -- that is, the kiss is meant as a simple pleasure sufficient unto itself, without the promise of future delights -- is a more impressive bit of legerdemain. Those who know French better than I claim that the French title, Un baiser, s'il vous plait ("A kiss, please) bears the implication of a kiss upon parting, which, if true, throws a lovely melancholy frame over the whole thing. And oddly, the melancholy of the outher story is much more satisfying than the fumbling consummation of the inner story.
All thanks to narration! ______ * I suppose playing the lead male role invites the Allen comparison and the preoccupation with the tiny physical details of a sexual encounter the Rohmer.
For most of the history of dramatic storytelling, originality of the plot was not considered a primary virtue. The ancient Athenians expected to know the story of the play they were going to see in advance--in fact, most of them were traditional stories they had known from childhood, or perhaps soon after. The playwright's art was the expression of that story and the character's reaction the events through verse and dance. Making up a new story would have completely confused your average Athenian, sort of like those two old ladies who always sit behind you at the movies and try to figure out the story out loud while you're trying to hear the dialogue.
Shakespeare, as we all know, swiped his stories from legends, from from Hollinshed's Chronicles from Plutarch's Lives and Italian and other story collections. Nobody faulted him for that in his own era. It is only since short story writers such as O'Henry and Maugham popularized the twist ending that it became bad form to give away the story, culminating in the great story conspiracy of Hitchcock's Psycho.
So the idea of a remake is not inherently dishonorable, at least in historical perspective. So why retell an already told story?
1. We know everybody likes it. The trouble with this in the home video era, is that we can always go back to the source. Back in the day, when MGM remade Little Women in 1949, they knew that not many people would have a good memory of the 1933 RKO version, but just to make sure, they bought the earlier film and suppressed it. But nowadays, if we're jonesing to see Wuthering Heights, we have the choice of about eight different versions, including a number of television adaptations. But none of them have the heat of the Olivier-Oberon 1939 version, one of the sexiest movies ever made where people keep their clothes on. (Other contenders: Notorious and To Have and Have Not.)
Worst example of "we know everybody likes it:" Gus van Sant's shot-for-shot remake of Psycho. Color film, lesser actors and nothing gained (and quite a bit lost).
2. Let's see how the story or the characters change when we bring them into a new era. So The Front Page, which has been filmed four times since 1929, was most recently set at a cable news network in 1988, to see how the story is different. Turns out, not much, but that was OK. In the case of The Women, the original 1940 characters lived in a world of severely limited possibilities for women, and competing for men was one of their few active options. Today's version makes those women seem even more petty and small, given all the other choices they could make with their lives. Body Heat is not a remake, but it frankly reworks themes and story tropes of Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice with the sexual frankness of the 1980s, not available to filmmakers in the 1940s. This may sound like the basis of a Skinemax epic, but Kasdan uses the sexual heat to add a layer of tension and ambiguity to the already complex characterizations.
3. Let's see how the story or characters change with different actors. A hit-and-miss matter. For example, Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr seem to click better in 1957's Affair to Remember than do Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne in the 1939 original, Love Affair. On the other hand Audie Murphy in 1954's Destry can't hold a candle to Jimmy Stewart in 1939's Destry Rides Again. (Besides, we all know that 1939 was a phenomenal year in film.)
4. Let's take the story in a different direction. This is not attempted very often. For one thing, there is often common source material, such as a novel. (Sometimes a remake will be done in order to return to the original story, such as the various remakes of Wuthering Heights and Dracula which purport to return to the source works and discard the "improvements" of the original Hollywood films.) The dreadful remake of Sleuth and Planet of the Apes felt compelled to add a new twist, since the original twists were so well known--in neither case did that work out well.
This final tack is how the French sex melodrama Nathalie (2003) became the American stalker flick Chloe (2008). In both cases, a woman decides to test her husband's fidelity by hiring a woman to try and have an affair with him (when was this ever a good idea?) The first half-hour of each film is almost scene-for-scene identical. Then they begin to diverge, and the final half-hour of each is almost utterly and completely different. Interestingly, Anne Thompson, co-writer and director of Nathalie participated in the reworking and approved it, presumably because the result was a completely different (and inferior) movie.
The differences are also illustrative of the differences between American and French ideas about sex and adultery. In France, adultery seems to be an almost inevitable hazard of long-time marriage, something to be gotten through, but survived. In the States, when the adultery is long-standing and has an emotional content (not merely casual sex), most people believe the marriage is and should be over. (I have not desire to point out who is more correct--it is merely an observation about the two cultures.)
Thus, when Fanny Ardant hires Emmanuel Beart to have an affair with her husband (Gerard Depardieu--who else?) she did not expect them to consummate it at first, but when it happens, she is not repulsed but intrigued. She sees an opportunity to gain perspective on her husband in the bedroom through this other woman's eyes. Ardant demands that Beart describe their encounters in graphic detail, and apparently derives a sexual frisson from that language. Ardant and Beart have a more obvious chemistry between each other than either has with Depardieu, and their bond seems deeper. Consequently, when it is revealed that Beart has betrayed Ardant's trust for the sake of a few Euros, Ardant is hurt; nonetheless, she has learned and grown from the experience, and husband and wife return to each other with a renewed commitment. (SPOILER ALERT - It helps that the Beart-Depardieu affair never happened.)
Americans are not so natural about their sexuality, and so Julianne Moore in Chloe never really ceases to be uptight. It doesn't help that Amanda Seyfried still looks she just got her high school diploma, not at all the experienced sophisticated seductress of the French film. It looks as though Moore is inviting her husband to be a pederast, not a roue. Like the original, the hired girl has her own agenda, but in Chloe it's not money she's after, but love. SPOILER ALERT - In the remake, the hired girl is unhinged, and pursuing the wife, who succumbs. Then, given the American penchant for hyped melodrama and the legacy of Fatal Attraction, Chloe goes completely around the bend, violence ensues, and Chloe dies a violent death, ostensibly because she wanted to hurt Julianne Moore, but subliminally as a punishment for being bi-sexual. (That minx--she betrayed all her customers in the strip club by not desiring them!)
So points for not doing a cookie cutter remake, which never works anyway, because once you've changed the artists--the actors, designers, photographer, director--you have a different film; not to mention the different setting in time and place. But points off for taking the initial story premise and steering straight for the cheap, the obvious and the fake. There is nothing to take away from Chloe to reflect on--it says nothing about marriage, sex, love or life. The only takeaway is "watch out for crazy people," which is something that I personally figured out a while ago. (Although it's not always possible.) Still, there was some creativity involved, though the result be largely negative.
The 1945 musical State Fair was remade in 1962 for straight-up commercial reasons. Musicals were becoming popular again, the songwriters Rodger and Hammerstein were money in the bank, and had a relationship with 20th Century Fox, the studio that filmed all the adaptations of their plays except the somewhat neglected Flower Drum Song and Fox already owned the story and six songs from the earlier film.
There were some problems. The 1945 State Fair is short at 100 minutes and lacking lavish production values, given the standards of 1962. The cast, settings, score and length would all need to be inflated. Moreover, only one of the six songs, "It Might As Well Be Spring" is integrated into the action of the story in the manner developed and popularized by Rodgers and Hammerstein. 20th Century Fox studio chief Darryl Zanuck once sent out an edict that songs in a musical had to be justified. That makes sense--the song should fit the characters who sing it and the story situation they are in. But that's not what Zanuck meant. He meant that if there was instrumental accompaniment, you should at least show a guy with an accordion, or else the audience would wonder where the music was coming from. Which demonstrates that for all his story sense in other areas, in musicals Zanuck was an idiot. Yes, musicals use an artifice and convention that people sing to express their emotional states, and that to make it more pleasing we provide an accompaniment. But cowboy movies, monster pictures and war pictures have just as many artifices and conventions--don't get me started.
The next time somebody says, "Musicals are stupid because they start singing and you can't figure out where the music's coming from," tell them, "All movies are stupid because people do all kinds of stuff in front of a camera but they never notice there's a camera and a cameraman." So there. It's all artificial, so get over yourself.
Another problem with the 1945 State Fair is that there are not enough songs for the story and a lot of key character developments go by without being musicalized, especially in the second half of the film, which starts bursting with chatter and even sprouts a strange character, a song-plugger played by ever-reliable Frank McHugh who talks for pages and pages about the music business but is really just there to provide the information that the young hero's sweetheart is unhappily married. It's really very lumpily put together.
So in 1962, some things are smoother and more professional. Where "That's For Me" was sung by a chanteuse before she has even met her sweetheart, it becomes an explosion of emotion for Pat Boone's character just after he has met Ann-Margaret. (It's Ann-Margaret in 1962--you can forgive a guy for wanting to run around singing. Or doing something.)
(Sorry, the actual clip from the 1962 film is not available, so here is the soundtrack with a montage of photos of Ann-Margaret. You should get the idea that the second version was more explicitly passionate.
"Isn't It Kind of Fun" is a harmless ditty in 1945. In 1962, it's the ammunition for a sex bomb, that is Ann-Margret one year before she tormented American youth with "Bye Bye Birdie."
And I really wish I could show you Tom Ewell singing, "Sweet Hog of Mine" to an enormous boar he is showing at the fair. Or Alice Faye teaching her daughter to "Never Say No To A Man" (meaning you can tell them no without actually saying the word). Where Dana Andrews in 1945 plays a city guy enjoying the rural sights, Bobby Darin in 1962 looks like he's on his way to another, better movie and trying to get this part over quick.
Whereas the cast of 1945 is sincerely committed to this candy-coated view of American rural life (part of the American Way we were defending so hard in 1945, in 1962--except for Pat Boone and Pamela Tiffin who were trying to launch film careers--everyone else looks like they showed up to pick up a paycheck.
Oh, and the setting of the Fair changed from Iowa (losing a charming song) to Texas. Blee-a-a-ah. Let's face it, the only good movies about Texas are the ones that show what narrow-minded hell it can be, like Giant, Hud and The Last Picture Show. Trying to make Texas lovable would be like making Kevin Spacey cute.
True, the Hollywood production system demonstrated that it was not always necessary to have passion to make a great film. Casablanca was churned out by the great production machinery like any other sausage, and it came out really tasty. But still, it helps if you have some else on your mind besides a meal ticket. That goes for remakes as much as any other kind of film.
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (2009) is based on a probably unadaptable book. In fact, it arrived on screen via a theatrical workshop in which writer-director John Krasinski participated. By no means does it encompass the entire book, nor is it a work of film mastery.
But it should be seen for the sake of three superb sequences of which any novice director could be very, very proud. The first is illustrated, an appalling story told by Chris Meloni, whom I had only known from Law and Order: SVU, but who evidently has an improv background, as evidenced by Wet Hot American Summer, which I will be writing about in the near future. Meloni's character tells of meeting a woman who has been wronged by a man. He deplores this fellow's terrible behavior and then takes advantage of her himself. Simple, predictable on paper, but Meloni delivers it with such variety and nuance--even while it is clear that this man is a self-absorbed jerk--that it still is a surprising and guilty pleasure.
Frankie Faison executes a brilliant set piece about his father, a washroom attendant, whose whole life was about pleasing the white man while remaining invisible, and his hatred, contempt and love for that father. And John Krasinski does a superb job with a long existential monologue about why men behave the way they do which should not work on film at all, but because of his skill and his confidence about the material, works perfectly. The language throughout is that of Wallace, which although not resembling actual human speech, but is artificial and self-conscious in such a way that it makes the material far less offensive than it would otherwise be.
Krasinski has added a frame story about a jilted woman who is conducting the interviews as part of a graduate thesis, but the structure is loose nonetheless, and the film is driven more by the quality of its parts than by a real narrative push. At times it feels like a comedy sketch film, especially due to the running conversation of two waiters, who operate as links between pieces; the theatrical roots of the project are never far from view (especially in the Faison piece, which is shot like a Jarmusch film, with head-on angles and static shots).
It makes an interesting contrast with The Vicious Kind (2009) another Sundance Festival favorite about why men are so terrible. The film almost disappeared, but has resurfaced this year due to the new prominence of its lead actor, Adam Scott, who starred in Party Down on Starz and Tell Me You Love Me and has a story arc in Parks and Recreation that started this spring and will continue into the fall.
Scott has a face and demeanor that allow him to play very kind and innocent people and horribly cruel people, and he does both as the confused, tortured, sleepless and angry Caleb in The Vicious Kind. Scott has long specialized in jerks, but you might call Caleb a jerk with an explanation.
It is a film about transgression and betrayal which throws your sympathies toward the transgressors. The innocent Peter is pretty annoying, and even J.K. Simmons doesn't become likeable until one learns that he was the guilty party in his marriage, not the injured one. Consequently our sympathies for Brittany Snow's Emma shift as she shifts from victim to vamp.
Oddly, what I thought about as I watched this film was not so much Neil Labute or David Mamet but Arthur Miller, because the primal nature of the triangle between two brothers and a father who, intentionally or not, puts the boys in competition with each other for his approval. Tellingly, the denouement is not about ultimate revelation and breat-beating truth-telling, as it would be for, say, Eugene O'Neill, but acceptance and, finally, a truce in the long family war. Writer-director Lee Toland Krieger does well with his limited story materials, keeps it simple, yet with steady motion. (I enjoy any indie movie which does not have long close-ups of actors staring at nothing in which I have no idea what they or I are supposed to be thinking.)
Emotional violence then, is like physical violence. The only way to stop the cycle is to just stop. That process makes surprisingly good film fodder.
This is the film blog I began to provide a model for my Film Studies students and encourage them to maintain a blog of their own. I no longer write about every film I see, but I try to take note of the unusual, the remarkable, the strange or interesting connections.
Please comment copiously!Or write to me directly at my e-mail address.
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