22. Pushback/Payback: New Movies reviewed by Pippa Hammet
Ever since the Albertine-Paco strike began, our employer Louise E. has been evolving plans for a Demon Cat movie, including appeals to the White House and Mar-a-Lago, and now she has snowbird Belle W. (proposed make-up artist for a renewed Ebersdorf Ballet) and Madam Sesostris (its potential Artistic Director) practically living here at our Tower. That’s fine by me because they and Louise have been listening every night to the recordings Sandy has made for A&P downstairs and for the interested Chinese in Hotan (our boy is now up to Firbank’s Caprice); therefore, I don’t always have to read them to sleep over the therapeutic purrs of Murr, my very own infatuated tomcat. Master Raro plays Sandy’s recordings and transports the magical feline to the master-mistress bedroom when I’m allowed a night out. (Murr has learned to serenade Louise even when I’m not present. Perhaps his persistent song is meant to speed my return?) The “unholy trio” bathe in the youthening fountain of words and music. As a result, I’ve been escaping to the movies, especially new films directed by women from around the world. There are more than usual – and often better than most.
Our renewed and refreshed Louise has become obsessed with spying on the Chinese through hacking into that government’s vast surveillance network which tracks its own citizens for misdeeds, but until clearance and high tech are obtained from the N.S.A., all Louise can do is voice patriotic concern that we are currently being spied upon by Xi Jinping through hidden cameras right here in the Tower. Louise wants its very walls examined for signs of electronic snooping. She has developed a tic of wheeling her mobile chair into a room and offering her profile to its every corner, as though mocking any Guoanbu “observers”. (Louise has now threatened to wear a bullet-proof vest indoors as news of regular U.S. street massacres pour in from Fox News and as Amnesty International declares our entire country unsafe for tourists. Louise has searched mail order catalogs for a really stylish protective vest.) Belle has volunteered to give everyone makeovers to foil the ever-watchful CCP’s facial recognition skills. Madame Sesostris has suggested plastic surgeries all round if it comes to that. I happily escape to the silver screen. It’s my Great Wall.
Our new millennium was heralded, as you may remember, with a great, defining movie by a female director: Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000). Has any filmmaker, male or female, surpassed this satiric portrait of a solitary man’s Wall Street mayhem? As one fan put it at the time, Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman is Our Savior! The only film comparison I can think of is Antonioni’s 1970 Zabriskie Point, which caught the temperature of our nation just before Kent State. (This much-maligned film was so prophetic it couldn’t be revived in the wake of that campus tragedy, rather like The Manchurian Candidate’s suppression by Frank Sinatra after the President Kennedy assassination.) I caught the revived Zabriskie recently at the Walter Reade and can report the collective shiver in the 2019 audience during the scene where guns are easily purchased at a fully equipped California arms emporium. Nothing has changed. Antonioni nailed it. So did Mary Harron.
In the meantime, she has delivered her new Charlie Says, an enquiry into the female cult around Charles Manson. It’s a scarily believable description of charismatic mind control, 1960s-style, and it resonates far beyond anything attempted in Tarentino’s tepid Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. Harron manages somehow without condescension to describe the flakey rationales of Manson’s tribe. She allows those young women a dignity even in their mortifications. You find yourself asking: could any male director today extract such strange beauty from performers under such highly un-P.C. narrative constraints? For example, Harron stages a lovely Dionysian thiasos, a parade of Manson’s dancing maenads along the California hills. The movie haunts months after a first viewing. To date, my favorite example of cinematic pushback has indeed been Harron: a female director who aims to offer us visions that a male-dominated movie industry will not or cannot provide.
Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook has become a cult film partly because she threw hook, line, and sinker at her leading lady, Essie Davis, who promptly swallowed the bait whole. The hyperbolic character of Amelia goes crazy because of delayed grief over the loss of her husband in an automobile accident while rushing her to a hospital to give birth to their son, Samuel. The fatherless boy is now six years old and going through the “terrible” years that children – but especially hyperactive males – can inflict. Not since Frank Perry’s Mommie Dearest has a cinematic child been so maligned by a deranged guardian. The extremity of the parental attack and the child’s nighttime terror before an animated children’s book character, the malevolent Babadook, are equated.
And not since Mommie Dearest has a movie so pushed child-abuse grotesquerie into areas of unconscious (?) camp: a costumed representative of the movie’s titular monster now features in many LGBTQ events. Ari Aster’s new Midsommer also gestures toward campery (that oversized ritual mallet, the female protagonist’s heavy floral robes). Perhaps his Director’s Cut will include still more. Only Canada’s Guy Maddin has been really expert at combining satiric parody and full-blown camp, as in his masterpiece, Careful. Essie Davis’ banshee performance in The Babadook may best be appreciated by viewers with an active taste for misogyny. I was also truly shocked at how unattractive Kent rendered the child actor, Noah Wiseman, as Samuel. Wiseman is a brave young performer.
Kent now follows up Babadook with her film on Tasmanian colonial injustices, The Nightingale. It reveals that she can make a contribution to the most fashionable movie genre of the moment: the revenge film. Up to now, Chan-wook Park’s 2003 masterpiece, Oldboy, has set the gold standard. (The Korean director is not nicknamed Mr. Vengeance without reason.) The genre allows victimhood to result in payback, the achieved revenge to lead to guilt or absolution or self-transcendence. The pattern has become a formula in today’s movies. (In Midsommer, the female lead allows vengeance to be taken against an insensitive boyfriend by a Swedish cult; she comes to accept his fiery fate as justified or even personally transfiguring.) In Kent’s two movies, the audience is encouraged to get to know the lead female victim at length and in extremis, rather as Cincinnatus is lovingly prepared for sacrifice by his executioner, Pierre, in Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading. And all the rest the same.
Kent’s fixation in The Nightingale on state-sponsored colonial injustices and their “correction” by the victim-turned-vigilante is unfortunate because the shock-horror movie style is gratuitous and regularly throws the viewer out of the film through what Kent seems to intend as literal depictions of brutality. (They are merely uncomfortable for performers and audience -- and void of meaning.) The Nightingale becomes a lengthy tour of an outback slaughterhouse. It gains what hold it maintains on the viewer through artful cinematography and precisely observed details. I feel sorry for any actress (or child) who works with Kent. The performer is in for it. (I feel the same way about any ballerina who dances for Wayne McGregor.) Notice I am not identifying the lead victim-actress in Nightingale. I too can push back.
The British director Joanna Hogg also deals with the theme of psychological payback. She is expert at targeting vulgar upper-middle-class Brits in contemporary settings. In Unrelated (2007), we saw her menopausal protagonist become infatuated with a handsome youngster (played by the handsome young Tom Hiddleston) on vacation beneath the cypress trees of Tuscany. When he at length coolly rejects her, revenge is obtained by spilling the particulars of an automobile accident for which the young man was responsible. But revenge turns out to be less than sweet. In her new film, The Souvenir, Hogg converts an autobiographical episode (her own first love affair with a sophisticated, drug-addicted older man) into what I initially took to be a feature-length attempt at psychic reconciliation, although one whose formalist style distances the pain of misalliance so thoroughly that the viewer has only the dimmest view of the beloved. Is this too a form of payback? We must surmise the wrenching effect of his betrayals and death upon the aborning film director, played by Honor Swinton Byrne, the daughter of the actress Tilda Swinton (also in the movie). The film observes a devastating personal crisis through the wrong end of a telescope. Perhaps it is partly that the actor playing the older man is miscast – another form of revenge on the character’s original? -- since it would be good to know what brought the heroine to her first infatuation beyond professional ambition. All that is missing are the cypress trees. But Hogg has Souvenir’s sequel in the works. Perhaps things will become clear upon its release.
Amanda Kramer’s new Ladyworld entraps a group of teenage girls who have gathered for a birthday party in what looks like the living quarters of what might be a training facility following a devastating major earthquake. The film documents an eventual descent into very unladylike behavior reminiscent of the surreal mayhem in Luis Buñuel’s brilliant The Exterminating Angel. The hopelessness of the situation allows individuals to take revenge on one another. Kramer uses a bit too much expressionistic clown makeup by her movie’s end, but she has forged her young actresses into a tight ensemble. The performances ring true throughout. The wide-screen cinematography and lighting by Patrick Meade Jones reminded me of the artistry of Antonioni’s great collaborator, Gianni di Venanzo (especially the opening scene in L’Eclisse). The almost submerged rooms retain meager daylight from the top margins of windows, and with this source Jones creates varied compositional effects reminiscent of Franz Kline canvasses from the 1950s, especially those great black-and-white tributes to the artist’s ballerina-wife, Elizabeth Parsons. Ladyworld’s excellent musical score is by Callie Ryan, and its unnerving soundscape has been designed by Giulio Carmassi and Bryan Scary. Kramer is a director to watch. Ladyworld is her second feature-length movie; I must catch up with her 2018 Paris Window.
Alice Rohrwacher’s 2011 film Corpo Celeste caught the way a young person (here, the twelve-year-old Marta) becomes a trouble-maker in order to test and best her social surround. Marta takes on a local Catholic priest who officiates at the confirmation ceremonies of her coevals. Rohrwacher has a gift for evoking sympathy for young mischief-makers. Perhaps it’s the bone-crushing conventionality of lower-middle-class life in Italy that makes childish rebellion seem inevitable. We are with the young actress who plays Marta – Yle Vianello -- all the way. Never underestimate the creative boredom of children.
Rohrwacher’s new film, Happy As Lazzaro (Lazzaro Felice) is the best new movie I have seen this year. (Its only real competition is Transit by Christian Petzold.) Lazzaro was shown for one week at the IFC Center here in Manhattan, and then it was sent to Netflix heaven. I advise waiting for this extraordinary film to be projected in a theater on a large screen near your place of residence – or investing in expensive 8K equipment for your undoubtedly palatial video room at home. It deserves to be seen and heard under optimum conditions. (Hélène Louvart’s Super 16mm color cinematography is that good.)
If Corpo Celeste paid tribute to the neorealism of Roberto Rossellini, Lazzaro shows the influence of Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema. On an Italian tobacco farm some three decades back, local workers are kept in economic conditions of medieval subsistence through exploitation by landowners and their lackey agents. One of the toilers, an entranced “holy fool” named Lazzaro, waits on his employers and fellow workers without complaint. He is on call around the clock. Eventually the dire situation on the farm is discovered by authorities, and the entire community is transported to another form of detention in the local city, where no one fares well on the streets. The workers become urban scavengers, and the former owners fall into final decadence. Not a pretty picture of living conditions in Italy yesterday, today, and perhaps tomorrow?
But Rohrwacher sees this world through the eyes of Lazzaro, a ploy which gives the film a magic in its realism, a fable-like grip as free of sentimentality as it is alert to both unique and repetitive survival strategies among the poor. The young man’s saintly mischief-making is contextualized among laborers barred from social-economic change. In one serene sequence, farm girls are promised reviving coffee by Lazzaro, but they have disappeared when he delivers the drink. His offering registers as a sacramental act, isolated, undeserved, free. The boy’s dedicated, selfless gesture could stand for the entire movie, mise-en-abîme, because silently uninflected and unremarked. Later, Lazzaro comes down with a fever or has an accident, after which twenty-five years pass, and he awakes, unaged, to find the farm deserted. He follows his fellows to the city and labors there to improve their common lot. Everything has changed except Lazzaro, who persists beyond active resistance and revenge.
Rohrwacher has been lucky in her choice of an actor for the role of Lazzaro. The young Adriano Tardiolo radiates an artless, near-Oriental calm. You could watch him all day, all night, but his story flies by. The director has cast her luminous actress-sister, Alba Rohrwacher, as the farm worker who becomes a leader of indigents in the city and the first to hail a resurrected Lazzaro. That recognition scene is transporting. Its depiction of belief in beatitude burns on the screen. The great Rossellini has a true disciple in Rohrwacher.
My Louise has demanded that we watch Oldboy together yet again. Do any movies besides American Psycho and Oldboy manage to catch our time’s sedulous dependence upon payback and pushback? No. Does any film suggest an alternative? Yes -- Lazzaro Felice.
P.H.
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