14. Distances: New Film Reviews by Pippa Hammet.
Louise’s dance studio is finally ready, and ballet rehearsals have begun on the thirty-fifth floor. Wanda, Mrs. Ebersdorf’s long-suffering caregiver-maid, tells me that on the Tuesday morning the rehearsal space was opened, Louise “exorcized” it with her Demon Whip at 7:00 a.m. sharp. Wanda (who was raised a Roman Catholic and has been through a lot with Louise over decades) says she’s never attended an exorcism, but she’s seen films, and that’s what it was like: Louise tooling about in her wheelchair, driving out any resident bad spirit from the new space with triple snaps of her Whip. As she careened around the hall, Wanda says Louise chanted repeatedly, “About, about in reel and rout!” (I have to Google that reference.) Wanda held up pretty well, considering (at least the whip was not being used on her – she has stories about afternoons at the movies with an angry Louise). Resident cat-experts Albertine and Paco must have been roused in their nearby quarters by the noise. God knows what the felines in their care thought. I suspect Louise’s spiritual guru, Madame Sesostris, had something to do with the early morning ritual.
For the first time, I myself was allowed to visit the former Cat Farm (now Rehearsal) floor, and I had never realized how prison-like the lab was in its design, presumably to keep the prize-winners safe? How could A&P stand the isolation down there? But Master Raro inevitably has his theory (he has so many). Master took it upon himself last week to inform our boss of the French investigators’ report on Albertine – that she possibly descends from 17th. Century Bayonne witches. Master says that Louise took the news without flinching. In fact, she smiled and muttered, “A worthy opponent!”
Master’s theory is that A&P have been living with Louise’s feline specimens under the hope that our employer might make them her heirs. (The couple, not the cats.) How else, he insists, explain nine years of servitude among the animals, even if you are doing some sort of research, as A&P claim? Since the pair contributed to the Ebersdorf Ballet’s unfortunate early closure, I can’t imagine Louise rewarding them with any inheritance upon her eventual passing. (I wonder what her will does contain at this point?) Besides, Louise is in the best of health for her age, looking especially hale now that she sleeps under the influence of my readings and her prize tomcat’s purrs at night. And that Murr can purr!
On Thursday last, Louise permitted Master and me to watch a rehearsal of the ballet being created by her choreographer Cheryl S. for A&P, and that meant viewing the session through two-way mirrors in a hidden observation room adjacent to the new rehearsal hall. (There were also video monitors with live images of the dancing, undoubtedly recorded: our Louise spares no expense for surveillance.) I had been introduced to young Cheryl when she arrived. I liked her evident nervousness and her focus. She’s a pretty blonde with sapphire blue eyes. When she got to work, Cheryl certainly knew what she was doing, handling A&P. Albertine wore black leotards and taupe tights, her hair in a severe bun, with pristine pointe shoes. Her Basque complexion glows. And Paco wore a white T-shirt and chinos.
I must admit their scene where Albertine resurrects Paco had a true frisson. Albertine becomes feline from a great mental distance – she’s operating out of some authentic, otherworld cat mentality. And Master agreed that the way Paco adapts himself to his wife’s movement rhythms suggests an animalistic bond more than intimate. Our Louise watched the rehearsal with a smile on her face. Afterwards, she thanked Cheryl and personally conducted her through the multi-gated exit to the main elevator. I hope Cheryl realizes what an honor that was. Louise said nothing to A&P afterwards. (She referred to them as “my Uighurs”.) Master took Louise upstairs, and I went back to my computer.
Over the last month, I caught three movies that I can report on, two of which were disappointments and one a surprise. First, the disappointments. Us was hailed in advance (and widely after its opening) as Jordan Peele’s follow-up to Get Out, his amusing horror film from 2017 that mixed country club slave-trade auctions with brain-transplant surgery to effective satiric ends. A great deal of skill at melodramatic filmmaking was on display there and firmly under directorial control. In Us, Peele has given us three movies in one: (1) a satire of middle-class family unease on an annual vacation; (2) a horror film with zombie doppelgangers; and (3) an apocalyptic directorial comment on class and racial divisions in today’s U.S. The opening satire works; the horror film section is fine until a clumsy boat sequence leads to narrative blur; but Peele’s end-of-the-world finale is an epic fail right up there with Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales. Hands-Across-America zombies spanning California horizons can’t begin to illuminate the complexity of our current national malaise. The world is too much with us these days for mere allegory to get a grip. And by the end of the movie, I could not care about differentiating performances and personae in the central Adelaide/Red doubling: both characters were equally uninteresting as played by Lupita Nyong’o. If you are going to show social chaos with automobiles burning on highways, you are inevitably going to evoke memories of Godard’s definitive Weekend. Peele does not provide the context or details for a comparable vision.
I bring up the movie because the film’s choreographer, Madeline Hollander, has collaborated with Peele to suggest toward the end of Us a connection between classical ballet and physical violence. This is the second film over the last release period (the other movie being the new Suspiria, where European modern dance gets the roughhouse treatment; see Louise’s review in BV’s Blog 3) to suggest that a lyric theatrical art hides something dangerously disruptive beneath a controlled surface. Both directors (Luca Guadagnino and Peele) appear to be working out a barely suppressed hostility toward the conventions of theater dance or at least revealing a misunderstanding of those conventions. And both directors seem unaware of how difficult violence can be to represent on film. Its effective stylization may be beyond them. Dance itself is strong enough to survive misrepresentation in movies, but perhaps certain filmmakers have been watching too many Step Up movies. Or too few. Us ends being not funny enough, not scary enough, and unconnected to the roil and broil of U.S. society in 2019. In its failure, Us becomes its own example of alienation.
Claire Denis’ new film High Life is a sci-fi comment on contemporary social isolation and group psychological drift. Like the opera (and soon-to-be movie) Aniara, from the poem by Harry Martinson, High Life deals with a crew of astronauts traveling beyond our solar system across generations of space-time. The claustrophobic atmosphere allows Denis to exploit erotic tensions and, eventually, the terminal aspirations of the two surviving crew members, a father and daughter pair who elect to surrender themselves to a gaping astronomical black hole rather than face either incest for furtherance of the race or the isolation of the mission. The original crew was entirely made up of criminals condemned to scapegoat service investigating outer space rather than enduring routine incarceration on their home planet, and this punitive group fate is supposed to intensify Denis’ steamy-doomy mise-en-scène. There’s even a rampant virus that appears to be reducing the on-board population.
When the astronauts eventually encounter a twin ship, that exploratory probe turns out to be occupied only by canines as experimental subjects: an analogy to be drawn here? Denis’ films are known for documenting social rituals (certain reviewers have compared the military aerobics in her Beau Travail to a “ballet”), but in High Life the constriction of the living quarters reduces possibilities for much action. When it occurs, it is convulsive or deadly. Characterization is reduced to plot device, with Juliette Binoche as the pro-active resident reproductive specialist and Robert Pattison as the reluctant sperm donor. (This is called “dramatic tension”.) The cinematography of Yorick Le Saux and Tomasz Naumiuk is so intimate the viewer becomes hyper-aware of body weight and mass, as well as skin texture and pigmentation. High Life journeys a long and airless way to arrive at a not very convincing apotheosis. Maybe Denis should make her next film about tattoo chic and body sculpture.
I bring up examples of films that emphasize class and physical distances because I keep noticing an emphasis on official examples of advocacy in our culture, or at least in the media. Am I alone? The populace is assumed to be hooked on buying into the next potential consensus. For example, have you noticed those burgeoning video celebrations of elaborate wedding ceremonies posted on the internet? Not since Nero. And the way Broadway audiences insist on a standing ovation for every show, every night? Also, isn’t there something eerie about the drill team choreography of the new boy-bands? (BTS’s fans style themselves regimentally as “The Army”.) Of course, this takes us toward Siegfried Kracauer country, and who wants to go there?
I refer both to forms of advocacy in the social circus and to those critical essays on the arts in today’s popular journalism that not only stress the need to support the work under review but also clamor for that art’s agreement with “relevant” generational prejudices, usually politically approved positions which the writers assume must be acknowledged to avoid alienating Millennials. And even if the fraught position has to be shoehorned into the artwork. Must every new film and play and ballet and opera argue a “woke” political brief? To counter looming anomie, agreement is no longer an elective. P.C. pressures can thus accumulate around the immediate production of art. The result is that a unique vision inevitably becomes suspect and is shunned for its very rarity. What is rewarded is certified fellow feeling: join the club!
Perhaps the truth is that we are more than ever a nation of closet “isolatoes”, to use Melville’s term. (Some viewers find Claire Denis’ Beau Travail to be a version of Billy Budd.) The best treatment of this theme in recent films is in The Chaperone, a story of female support across the generational divide and featuring that silent film icon, Louise Brooks, as a main character. The screenplay is based on a novel by Laura Moriarty, and it concerns a Midwestern housewife and mother of two strapping sons who chaperones the sixteen-year-old Brooks to New York in the 1920s for Denishawn dance training. Elizabeth McGovern plays Norma, who in middle age uses the big city to escape a marriage fallen into disrepair (her husband has lately been discovered in a bedroom tryst with a college buddy), and Louise (Haley Lu Richardson) is just starting her climb in show business, before her years in the Follies, in Hollywood, and before the great G. W. Pabst in Berlin created her iconic image as Lulu in Pandora’s Box.
In New York, Norma watches Louise display a youthful unconcern for conventional moral strictures when not in dance class. Norma herself investigates her unknown natal background (she was orphaned as a newborn) by asking a Catholic orphanage to reveal the identity of her biological parents. She is refused access to the relevant files, but with the aid of a janitor (played by Géza Röhrig) she obtains a name and an address. The implication is that without Norma’s aid Louise might not have been able to catch the eye of Ted Shawn, and without the example of Louise’s courage and free spirit, Norma would not have pressed her case for background information on her parentage. (Norma also begins an affair with that janitor, a plot development I thought a bit forced.)
Ruth St. Denis is enacted by the elegant Miranda Otto, and Ted Shawn is played and danced by Robert Fairchild, late of New York City Ballet and Broadway’s An American in Paris. Otto doesn’t so much dance as orate (“As the Prophet said, ‘We shall see!’”). Fairchild demonstrates dance movement in the Denishawn School sequences, and the camera follows him adequately. Haley Lu Richardson is impressive in Brooks’ dance scenes, although the camerawork sometimes cuts her off at the knees. How could director Michael Engler have allowed this visual surgery? Richardson is generally restrained in her acting as Brooks – she doesn’t need Full Flapper Fig. I wanted more of her.
The movie’s best sequence takes place in Central Park when Norma’s enquiries result in a brief reunion with her biological mother, played by Blythe Danner. Norma’s yearning to be officially recognized by “Mary O’Dell” is denied almost immediately because of class differences. Engler lets the scene have an awkwardness that is excruciating at exactly the right level of felt need – the silence into which the two women retreat is both precipitant and eternal. Norma’s longing for emotional intimacy and her dawning sense of its profound impossibility could not be enacted with greater force. For her, the hoped-for past vanishes and the future is newly uncertain. The two actresses and their director have achieved something rare in filmmaking today: a stinging vision of how dependent self-identity can be on memory and dream. We as viewers are allowed to form our own analogy with Brooks’ need for communion through her art, despite the career difficulties to be encountered over a lifetime. The dancer and her chaperone traverse private and public fields of struggle. The issues they face are real.
There is a decade-later dinner party toward the end of the movie back in Norma’s home town (she returns there with her janitor-lover and his motherless child), and Engler stages it with Norma’s husband, his lover, the two sons, Norma’s janitor and his daughter, and a revived and flourishing Norma herself -- everyone reconciled over the years, each separate soul, however isolated, having found a place at the American table. Perhaps this is our democracy depicted in its best reward, a dream of autonomy achieved through crafted and accepted distance. Communally, everyone honors everyone’s right to difference. Even later, after Norma has encouraged an older, visiting Louise Brooks to chronicle her story (Lulu in Hollywood) tit-for-tat and finish her life in triumph as a writer, we see the chaperone and her janitor-lover walk off into the Midwest sunshine, arm-in-arm. I assumed that shot was satiric. But I’m not sure. The screenplay is by Julian Fellowes of Downton Abbey fame, so there may be some conventional moral suasion attempted at the close.
The choreographer of the Denishawn dance sequences is John Caraffa, who supplies a shorthand impression of the style. It is interesting to watch Richardson and Fairchild fill in vivid performance details in the time allotted. But the film belongs to McGovern and Danner in that Central Park interview.
I wonder if my employer, Louise E., was named after Louise B.? My feline admirer, the tomcat Murr, has migrated to the bolster at the foot of my bed, with my reluctant permission, next to the bedpost where hangs my cultural-critic cap for the evening. Murr now lies down rather than sitting rigidly erect on my bureau, but he nestles his chin on his paws and continues to keep his eyes on me all night long. (I assume; when I close my laptop, I close my eyes for sleep.) No alienations to be indulged by our Murr.
P.H.
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