Obedience

Clothes make the woman.  A servant dressed as a duchess.

There is one fascinating sequence in the unexpectedly mild Farewell My Queen (2012), the only film I've seen about the French Revolution which could be described as "understated."  The Revolution has begun, everyone is fleeing Versailles and Sidonie, reader to Marie Antoinette and profoundly devoted to the queen, has been asked to assume the disguise of the queen's intimate friend, the Duchess of Polignac.  (Everyone is all in a tizzy about the suggestion of homosexuality in this film, but it seems a rather tame escalation of the intimacy among women customary of the time.  It was a way to experience tenderness unavailable in conventional marriage, and for the Queen it was a relationship which avoided the accusations of treason which would have followed any relationship with any male.)  The Duchess will pose as her maid.  It is simply a matter of exchanging clothes.

Tellingly, this exchange of identity begins with a ritual humiliation.  One of the Queen's attendants insists on stripping Sidonie down to her skin.  No man is present, but clearly Sidonie feels vulnerable and attempts at first to cover herself, but admonished to stop.  The implication is that such modesty is presumptuous in the presence of her superiors, especially the Queen.  And it works.  The ordinarily feisty Sidonie is docile, accepting -- perhaps a little resentful -- but she patiently waits for the Duchesses's gown to arrive to be put on her.

What follows is equally instructive.  As you can see by the illustration above with Lea Seydoux (whose performance has been woefully underappreciated), Sidonie's head is no longer bowed and subservient.  Her head is up, her shoulders are back, she walks with command.  Anyone who has worn formal clothing of a previous era may recognize how the structure of those clothes affect the way one holds one's body and, consequently,the physical attitude one presents to the world.  Sidonie walks as a duchess, and even though the other staff knows who she is, they are confused as to how to acknowledge her, now neither wholly another domestic, but not wholly a duchess.  (This is complicated by the fact that Polignac's elevation to the title was rather questionable to begin with.)

As the film ends, the charade is successful.  Polignac is rather snippy and bitter for a maid, at least within the privacy of the coach, but upon presentation of the papers to the guard, Sidonie is appropriately both demure and haughty, and she and the Duchess and the Duchess's beard-husband are given safe passage.  From then on, Sidonie literally disappears, vaporizes.  We hear her, but we do not see her, as she mourns the fact that she shall now become no one.  Because, after all, what dress is she to put on now?

Stripped of uniform, stripped of personhood.

Compliance (2012)  seizes on the difference between being clothed and being naked and builds it into almost its entire narrative.  Again, the agenda is humiliation, and again, that humiliation can lead to a loss of identity, of self-possession, of self itself.  It is not necessary to recap the plot -- the internet is full of discussions of its veracity.  I also recommend you check out the various videos on line on the Milgrim experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment about the way people will both comply with authority and assume dictated roles of power. [These ideas are also explored in the two films - German and English- of Funny Games directed by Michael Heneke and in Das Experiment and The Experiment, also German and English films, which restage the Stanford experiment.] At least Marie Antoinette had a benign intention -- to save two beloved companions.  Here the sole item on this fastfood menu is cruelty.

And as if having to wear a fast food uniform wasn't humiliating enough by itself, now poor Becky is forced to take it -- and all her clothing off.  A lot of other things happen, and the real central manipulation takes place between the prankster and the distressingly foolish store manager, a woman so unable to handle authority that it is a wonder she was not part of the last presidential administration.  But it is Becky who is functionally naked for over and hour of this film's brief running time, and as it progresses we see how she loses the ability to object, to protest, to resist; the share fact of nakedness compels submission.  A naked person is a weak person and that simple step virtually destroys the young woman's sense of herself as something worth attention, respect, simple decency.

Even the epilogue of the film virtually ignores her in favor of her confused manager.  I suppose it makes sense -- the manager is our surrogate in the film, the one who is manipulated in a way we are seduced into saying could never happen to us.  She makes the mistakes we would make.  It's harder to identify with a victim as purely victim as Becky.  Moreover, she becomes voiceless and almost numb somewhere after the half-hour mark of the film.  And if Compliance is meant to be a cautionary tale, than the behavior to be cautioned against is that of the manager who truly had the power to put a stop to the whole thing, not the poor naked employee.  Happily, director Craig Zobel manages to keep that going without having to humiliate the actress herself.

And most terrible for both characters in these two different films is that they are made to feel shame when it is those who put them in that position who should feel the shame.  And a nod to both directors, (Benoit Jacquot and Craig Zobel, respectively) who made us witnesses to their degredation without creating a prurient or voyeuristic filip to the action, other than what is already embedded in these sorry events.

How they killed THE MESSENGER

The Messenger (2010) is a brilliant 30-minute film about two men commanded to do an impossible, soul-destroying job. After that first 30 minutes, there is mixed up pile of melodrama and faux humor which discards the value of the work done at the outset.

That might be too extreme. As long as the film adheres to the specifics of casualty notification procedure, it retains a certain balance and tension between natural human inclinations and the protocol established, a protocol which has evidently proved effective in protecting family members and the persons serving in the notification unit. Yes, it's artificial, but it's proven to be safe.

Then apparently, someone said, "Well, let's see what happens when these experienced and loyal officers decide to toss out their training and discipline and act like any ordinary lunkhead." So one notifier strikes up a tentative romance with a widow (yecch!) and the other one falls off the wagon (after, evidently, many years on) and it all feels as though the scriptwriter was working away, getting the job done, then took a break, watched The Last Detail, and decided, "That's what we need--a lot of overcooked histrionic horse crap!"

One of the pleasures about stories about the military (this is especially true of the British military) is those moments when everyone involved knows that what is needed is the suppression of emotion and adherence to protocol. This fuels some of the best John Ford films, in which personal desire is sublimated to duty. The Messenger is indulgent in a way that seems like an outsider, a non-military person, imagining how they would act in this situation. Without any narrative destination, the movie walks around in a big circle, like a dog looking for a place to lie down, and goes to sleep.

There is no technique in the film to speak of. Long takes to let actors do their long, drawn-out thing. Other than letting the camera run there does not appear to be any awareness of the possibilities of film technique.

I don't want to sound callous. But officers value professionalism. And so do some filmmakers. But not the ones you see in this film.

Maybe too true

This is how respected Mark Ruffalo is among actors: Ethan Hawke, who is an actual movie star, gracefully plays second banana to Ruffalo in What Doesn't Kill You (2008). (I am reminded of Jude Law content to play straightman to Robert Downey, Jr. in Sherlock Holmes.) What Doesn't Kill You (2008) is as much of a showcase for Ruffalo as it is for its first-time director and co-writer, Brian Goodman. It rises and travels on Ruffalo's performance, but that work cannot overcome the story's basic lack of true drama.

The story is reportedly based on the events of Goodman's life, which is both the film's strength and its fatal flaw. Strength, because of the exciting events and difficult choices of the protagonist's life. Fatal, because Goodman does not have the craft or the distance to shape those events into a truly dramatic shape. It is all bits and pieces, incidents and scraps. It begins with a hold-up scene reminiscent of Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, then turns into a Boston-tough-guy movie like Gone, Baby, Gone; both of which are superior to the present film.

The use of the opening scene followed by flashbacks almost disguises the fact that the film has no real structure. Ruffalo and Hawke are errand boys for some gangsters, Ruffalo has a wife and a family--Hawke does not, they take on some "projects" of their own, they excite the enmity of their bosses, they get arrested, they go to jail, they come out. Hawke wants to rob an armored truck, and--here is the dramatic crux; after Ruffalo talks with his son and realizes he doesn't want to risk jail, he decides not to go.

That's right, the central dramatic event of the movie is a guy who decides not to do a risky thing. Now that's laudable, it's praiseworthy, but it's not story-telling. Quick--name a classical dramatic narrative which turns on the hero's decision not to act. No, Bogart not leaving with Bergman in Casablanca doesn't count, because he then shoots the Nazi captain and goes on the run. And Hamlet doesn't count just because it takes him 4 out of 5 acts to do something. He does, at last, take action against his sea of troubles.

I'm not saying this couldn't be dramatized, but I don't think novice writer-director Brian Goodman has the skill or experience to do it. Having the work based on his own experience, which I'm sure made him reluctant to over-dramatize the events didn't help either. The dramatist must be ruthless with facts to create narrative pull.

One minor note--the film doesn't make criminal life look any better than being a working stiff (good) but doesn't make prison look worse than a time-out for adults (bad). Yeah, your room is a little small, but you get to walk around and talk with your friends, and you don't have to decide what to wear in the morning. Prison looks like no big deal, which I am sure was not the intention.

One thing's sure, though: Mark Ruffalo is one of our master actors, in a class with Kevin Spacey, Robert Downey, Jr. , Liev Schreiber and Johnny Depp, and let's hope he gets a chance to demonstrate his powers in a mainstream film which gains him the recognition among the general public that he already has with his peers.