Cleaning Up My Mental Hard Drive
I’ve been seeing so many good flicks while cooked up in my post-holiday-bubble weekend that I’m thinking it wouldn’t hurt exorcizing some, to make room for others, natch. Here’s a bit of ranting.
Martha Marcy May Marlene – Out of all the movies about cults (not automatically cult movies, mind) I’ve been watching over the years, this one stands out because of that Olsen sister no one had heard about or, as far as I’m concerned, even knew existed. She’s gorgeous, the kind of gorgeous that creeps up on you, and more importantly she’s not an anorexic, or a crappy actress – aside from the name, there’s nothing to link her to her infamous sisters. Tyro helmer and writer Sean Durkin directs her in a story of childhood gone Charles-Manson wrong. Shaking things up from all the other similarly-themed movies, we meet her character just as she’s leaving the hippie compound, and it’s through flashbacks that we’re shown what disrupted her eco-friendly communal existence. Lizzie’s received so many nods and awards for this her breakthrough debut (aside from a small part in a TV flick when she was 5, it’s her first role) that THR is calling her a “major threat” that might upset predictions come Oscar time. She’ll be following the 4-Ms with a one-take horror flick like no other (so they claim), and I’ll be along for that ride too.
Puncture – True story (well aside from the one this movie’s based on ), I pushed play on Puncture hoping to see Chris Evans’ six pack and get thinspired to follow through on my New Year’s resolution. Imagine my surprise when Bright Eyes’ phenomenal “Road to Joy” comes on over the intro, an establishing scene that didn’t bode all that well though – yet another lone-wolf hero tale where society’s money-grubbers are brought to justice? Folk music and formulaic storyline aside, this works (again) as a vehicle for the leading man – who knew there was more to Evans than his bumpy-in-all-the-right-places bod? He pulls off the druggie lawyer look and somehow doesn’t (John Hawkes in the role of the Manson-type leader in the flick above is more appropriately stringy, translucent even, and he’s supposed to be living off the land?!). Anyway, Evans’ kid-like passion for what’s right carries the boring bits through and his ending gives the film a memorable poignancy that offsets the main storyline. Sadly, the case itself doesn’t come close to tugging at the heartstrings as it should’ve done. First time helmers Adam and Mark Kassen make a sibling duo worth keeping an eye on.
Albert Nobbs – I for one like my leading men mascaraed, flamboyant and in drag; on the other hand, the tomboy/butch look does nothing for me, but even so I was intrigued by this flick that catapulted Glenn Close into the Oscars race. Presumably bringing Albert Nobbs’ story to the screen has been a labor of love for her, one that she’s been trying to get off the ground for ages – I can see why studios might balk at the storyline, it being a period piece with a one-track mind and some pretty un-relatable drama. Still, both Close and fellow thesp-on-testosterone Janet McTeer got a Golden Globe nomination out of their chameleonic feat… spending their screen-time in 19th century menswear. Joking aside, Close truly pulls off going native in another men’s world, though her being in it is the only strong (penguin) suit this rather dull movie has to offer. P.S. Scratch my abovementioned tomboy snub, I just remembered Tilda Swinton manning up for Orlando and Constantine… yumm!
Perfect Sense – A string-budget stab at the sci-fi genre taken by Mister Foe helmer David Mackenzie… makes perfect sense, though to him it wasn’t always as obvious. The Scot was also responsible for the dire Kutcher-starrer Spread, only to then realize he missed making movies with a soul and so he came back to what he does best, British indies. I couldn’t be happier with his choice of post-L.A. material, though it is one of those hybrid flicks that will have purists dangling pitchforks – I for one have a soft spot for dramas laced with sci-fi, like Another Earth, but many a geekier critic won’t enjoy this flick for what it is. And no, it’s not a love story, not primarily, it’s a love letter addressed to human kind. Sure, the main plot follows Ewan McGregor’s and Eva Green’s characters falling in love, sure they’ve got chemistry in spades and sure the romance unfolds artfully, but what really stays with you is the background it’s unfolding against: a world descending into a slow-burning apocalypse, yet somehow soldiering on despite it. For me, the clincher was realizing Ewan and Eva’s occupations in the film were meant to underline that age-old mantra – adapt or die. I loved how the chef tinkered with his recipes to grapple with the punters’ loss of smell, and I loved that it wasn’t yet another movie with a hero complex, where the epidemiologist fights the disease to her dying breath.
Submarine – Not since the peerless noir Brick have I seen a high school teen quite so pretentious in a movie quite so grey and flavorsome at the same time. But while Brick was ostentatiously set in a seedy crime-ridden world, a mere conceit that smacked of cinematic experimentation, Submarine is realistic… enough. The two actually have nothing else in common except for an overarching patina of highfalutin speech that makes for untenable, yet pitch-perfect leads. Richard Ayoade’s freshman effort is a (largely) British indie dramedy, so you’re coming into it expecting generous-to-unmanageable servings of eccentricity – none of the characters disappoints, notably the teen, his parents, his girlfriend, even his neighbor, there’s no shortage of screws loose! Yet they all somehow hold up as complex people, not mere caricatures, and Craig Roberts’ 15-year-old is a notch above the rest only inasmuch as it’s his first-person narrative we’re watching. Neatly packaged in chapters, artistically filmed and edited, his story finds him at cross purposes with his folks and hopelessly in love with a classmate. So nothing mind-bending in terms of plot points per se – if it’s unerringly original, it’s thanks to Ayoade’s consistent directing, a tightly-written script and the acting chops of every single cast member (even the young’uns, who unlike their American counterparts actually look the part).
Sleeping Beauty’s Sexual Awakening, or Breillat’s Reverse Wonderland
I’m not going to be the one to cringe at the cinematic vision of my favorite French “auteur-esse,” but I will say this: Catherine Breillat’s Sleeping Beauty redux, aka the TV movie La Belle Endormie that takes her midway through a scrumptiously sexualized trilogy of fairy tales, would’ve failed in any other (read, manlier) hands. Her main character, hogging most frames in the flick, is princess Anastasia, a 6-year old tomboy played by Carla Besnaïnou with just the right dosage of naiveté and feistiness to make herself quite an endearing centerpiece. Which, as a sidebar, is not a feat Breillat’s teeny or even teen actresses can ever be counted on to achieve (they rarely even seek its achievement) – it also means we care about this young princess more than about the trail-blazing director’s other prepubescent nymphs.
The point here is that this lovable tomboy is being put through the wringer – while not “exploited” in any gruesome way, she does get a story arc that’s filled with coming-of-age allegories, most of which she faces dressed in miniature-femme attire. She starts out, right after the opening credits, as a baby who’s destined to die from a terrible curse cast by a witchlike fairy – but three other fairies, younger, prettier lasses, intervene to sweeten the pill, reducing her sentence to a one-hundred year stretch that she’ll spend sleeping rather than dead. The curse takes effect when the child is six, and about to tread the boards in a home-affair type of performance art – we see the prophetic spindle jammed in Anastasia’s little hand and, next thing we know, she’s crawling through a cavern and getting pawed at by a wart-ridden carnivorous ogre.
The best thing about the journey she embarks on from this point onwards is that she knows it all to be a century-long dream – this somehow accounts for the princess’s fearlessness, more so than her oft-professed desire to have been born a boy, an excuse for raising hell that many little girls resort to. As she kicks off her fantasy (we also know it’s hers because nothing bad ever really befalls her), Anastasia happens on the home of Peter and his mom, where she stays for a while, embraced as a walk-in sister to the former. Later on, when her adoptive big brother runs away, in thrall to the statuesque and glacial Snow Queen, Anastasia strikes out on her own again, in search for him, for the one she’ll eventually admit was her “amoreux.” She’ll meet other child-like helpers along the way, like any fairytale hero(ine) is wont to do, some of whom claim to be much older than her, i.e. just diminutive people.
It’s this convention that can become a bit iffy at times, as, while the girl herself doesn’t seem to grow up, her occasional companions all affect a strikingly artificial maturity in addressing her. Even when Anastasia does eventually wake up, a hundred years in the future, her attitude is still that of a 6-year-old, which makes the advances of Johan, Peter’s 17-year-old great-grandson, feel a bit unseemly. A lot of Breillat’s screenplay reads like a problem play, where the overbearing writer-director crams references to the central themes (the definition of puberty leaps off the page, quite literally, via the blatant artifice of having Anastasia love dictionaries). This sort of subject matter is by no means a new line of inquiry in the controversial helmer’s filmography, it’s actually a pet focus of hers – and in La Belle Endormie the well-trodden ground gets a lighter rehash. But the stage play, inhabited as it is by pint-sized grown-up wannabes turning in forced perfs, rings creepy when actual life-sized grown-ups come into it.
Even if Anastasia’s told time and time again that “ce n’est pas l’endroit où se faire remarquer,” the girl can’t help it: Breillat’s focus never wavers from her, like a proud parent’s, engaged in capturing each and every gesture, action and reaction. The only moment when the camera stops fawning over the expressive little thesp, long enough for us to notice her gone, is the drawn-out gypsy party where the golden-toothed singer Delia Bouglione-Romanès takes center stage. If that scene stands out just as much as the Taraf’s bursting into singing in The Man Who Cried, Besnaïnou is remarkable all through the other frames of Breillat’s Sleeping Beauty. With this new makeover of a children’s classic story, the French helmer outdoes herself – literally, since her earlier makeover of Barbe Bleue counts as a first, slightly more convoluted, attempt at the nowadays more and more popular genre of the tale retold.
