66. Interventions: N.Y.C.B. Virtual Spring Gala and “French Exit”, reviewed by Pippa Hammet
Mme Sesostris has been steadfastly attentive to me and my beloved pet Murr, so I decided to reward her with a night out to see a new film directed by Azazel Jacobs and starring Michelle Pfeiffer. Over the many pandemic months, our house psychic has protected my brillianrt feline from insistent demands from downstairs (meaning Albertine and Paco) that dear Murr serve as a ready backup for the twenty-one Ebersdorf prizewinners appearing in A&P’s new po-mo animal act – that is, when and if Louise E. gives permission for its premiere. (Sandy says the ensemble work must be seen live to be believed.) Whenever Albertine applied pressure, Mme S. would advise Louise to stonewall, and nobody stonewalls like our boss. Sesostris herself would simply look into the astral distance, shake her head, and chant “Ride your ways, Albertine! Ride your ways!”, and once again Murr’s ebony fur would be saved from rank exploitation.
So off Madame S. and I went to the Angelika last week to see the new Michelle Pfeiffer movie. French Exit has a screenplay drawn from a novel by Patrick DeWitt by the author himself. (DeWitt wrote the fiction on which that fine 2018 film The Sisters Brothers was based.) It analyses the mother-son relationship between Frances Price, an aging Manhattan socialite, and her young son Malcolm. Both have suffered from mistreatment by Frances’s late husband, Malcolm through the man’s perfected absence from the boy’s life and Frances through her discovery that the family fortune is depleted and she must sell all her possessions and find a new residence. As Frances puts it, she always expected her funds to last until her death but “Here I am!” A close female friend suggests Frances and Malcolm occupy her small, unused apartment in Paris to recover, and soon mother and son set forth on a first-class cruise to France via luxury liner.
Frances smuggles her black cat (!) onto the ship and into the Paris apartment. She buys her son a bicycle as a Christmas present and otherwise finds prodigal ways to reduce her supply of Euros as fast as possible: in other words, to encourage the approach of her own end. (From Frances’ point of view, life requires funds, and without funds, what’s the point?) Inevitably, her generous philanthropy attracts a series of needy, amusing characters. The film is unusual for its light touch, its steady humor, and its deft stylization. For example, the trip across the Atlantic is depicted with what are obviously studio sets, handsomely designed by Jean-Andre Carriere. The direction by Jacobs is clearly influenced by the high artifice of 1930s American rom-coms.
It is also stylish in its handling of the paranormal aspects of the narrative. We learn that the soul of Frances’ departed husband (Malcolm’s father) is now resident in the family cat, which promptly scratches Frances and disappears into the Parisian night. This allows the film’s artful cinematographer to show us the city from highly selective and resonant angles as a search proceeds to find the absconding animal. The movie’s views of urban streets at night are enough to send shivers down your spine. You think, “Ah, yes, Utrillo!” The cinematography is by Tobias Datum.
The mother and son collect about them a next-door neighbor, a psychic “witch”, and a private detective in order to hold a séance to contact the feline-avatar. This shift into what could be a jarring new mode (fantasy, spiritualism) is accomplished without melodrama. The viewer becomes aware that the transition has been prepared by a number of correlated actions. There is that early scene in a lightless kitchen with Frances sharpening butcher knives. Malcolm approaches to discuss the possibility of his coming marital engagement only to have a blade hurl itself across the room at him. He retreats. With her attendant black cat, Frances herself is somewhat witchy. In Central Park, mother and son encounter an indigent who asks for a handout to buy a bottle of wine. By the end of the film, Frances is seen buying a final bottle of expensive vino. A very French waiter is punished by Frances for dilatory service with an improvised table-top conflagration; then, subsequently, at an outdoor bistro, Frances writes and abandons a postcard addressed to her accommodating N.Y. woman friend announcing plans for suicide, and that missive is mailed by yet another French waiter, an act that results in an attempted rescue from the States.
There are actually two séances in the movie, each featuring the sepulchral voice of Tracy Letts as the spirit of the unrepentant and overbearing husband-father. And French Exit caps its artifice by having all of the characters who are attracted to Frances’ spendthrift habits eventually assemble en masse in the borrowed apartment and sleep over for a kind of group intervention. It’s a Greek chorus that the film justifies through its sustained stylization and deft tonal modulation. So seldom these days do you find a movie willing to attempt something so tenuous and yet bold. It is inspiriting when such a ploy works, as here. Usually, we get one tone or one style per film, and that is often not enough. I’m thinking of the way a type of photographic realism is monotonously maintained in all of the superhero movies that attract indulgent young audiences. Youth doesn’t know what it is missing.
The director Azazel Jacobs is the son of Ken Jacobs, famed American avant-garde filmmaker. Perhaps, after all, genes do tell. The DeWitt screenplay is substantive in its themes and structure, but without the direction of the actors and the Jacobs lightness of touch in the ensemble scenes, French Exit would deflate. There is a strong sense of comic pacing and satiric point throughout.
And there is Michelle Pfeiffer, who nails Frances. Here is the monstrous middle-aged New York socialite, betrayed and bitter, who comes to abandon her over-domination of every social situation in order finally to educate and free her son from his anger at the absent father and his Oedipal entanglement with Mom. My only real criticism of the movie is that there is a climactic mother and son scene outside her bedroom where the two literalize their enduring bond. The use of dialogue here feels overdone. It may be one stress too many in a film that is unusually fleet in its emotional pressures and ironies. Lucas Hedges is very fine as Malcolm. His growing appreciation of his displaced mother is signaled in quiet little smiles at each of her arch triumphs. One of the jokes of the film is that it has to go to Paris to find eccentrics and monsters worthy of Frances’ scorn. And it is one of the ironies of the movie that Frances’ spirit-guide – her “familiar” – is her pet cat. The creature leads her out of the Parisian apartment into the city’s wilds, but the last we see of the pair, Frances is the leader, tailed by her bête noire.
Madame Sesostris loved the movie. Is there a higher recommendation?
And now we come to an offering on a somewhat lower level of achievement: Sophia Coppola’s new film of New York City Ballet’s mid-pandemic return to its home theater, the Koch. (This digital work is now streaming gratis on the Internet under the title “New York City Ballet Spring 2021 Gala”.) Coppola has stated in interviews how little she knows about the art of ballet. Her employers can’t say they were not warned. The resultant movie pays a great deal of attention to cinematography and physical settings, somewhat less to the dancers and their dancing. Several techniques have been used to distract attention from the work of performers and choreographers. The movie’s tonal range is predominately black-and-white, for the look of a serious arthouse film. When a camera investigates a rehearsal room, we explore it high and low. When a static camera position is held throughout a dance, the safe distance from the dancers reduces their impact. When we find ourselves on the Koch Promenade, the camera shoots into northern sunlight, reducing the performers to silhouettes. A lengthy male solo on the stripped Koch stage has a moving camera in constant action, producing a visual blur. The black tights of the dancer blend into the dark background, obscuring legwork. Finally, with a finale excerpting Balanchine’s last movement of Divertimento No. 15, we go full color but also full stage frame for the ensemble. The lead ballerina (Tiler Peck) becomes just one of many amid the rush. The overall effect is video-impressionistic. Every cliché currently used to photograph dance is on display. The result is the opposite of a collaboration: S. Coppola is the featured player here (“player” in the hard-sell Hollywood sense).
The “concept” for the production – a graduated approach to full stage occupancy through a survey of the dancers’ environs – is credited to Coppola and Justin Peck. Another filmmaker might have made something resonant from such a germ of an idea. By failing to clarify the dances and vivify the dancers, C&P have reduced a living art to bibelots and relics, like the kitsch ornaments lovingly described in a Henry James’ short story, “Crapy Cornelia”: “ . . . the most animated of pink-and-white, of ruffled and ribboned, of frilled and festooned Dresden china shepherdesses with exactly the right system of rococo curves and convolutions and other flourishes, a perfect bower of painted and gilded and molded conceits.”
Sophia Coppola is big on flourishes. Her mental and visual focus lies somewhere beyond the dancers of New York City Ballet, who are hard to descry amid the high-tech clutter. Anthony Huxley and Tiler Peck look in shape. I cannot comment on the choreography of Justin Peck’s new solo for Huxley until it can be encountered free of the filter of its digital medium. I must remark, however, that Peck’s use of the Samuel Barber Adagio for Strings is discouraging. Remember the story of Vera Stravinsky, accosted at a Los Angeles concert by a fan recommending that she appreciate a new Barber work? “Yes,” she replied, “especially since Igor and I don’t make it to the night clubs much anymore.” You can depend on J. Peck for a floor show.
We are also reminded that S. Coppola is an expert on high school fetishisms, as in her movies Marie Antoinette and The Bling Ring. The only other film director who currently matches her in expensive visual décor would have to be Luca Guadagnino, who sidelines as an interior decorator for the Euro-rich. If only Sophia and Luca would collaborate on an issue of House Beautiful or spawn future numbers of Architectural Digest. The choreographies of Balanchine and Robbins are handled in the new Virtual Gala as opportunities for product placement.
Is it possible that here is evidence for the adage: like father, like daughter? Coppola pere would be the perfect movie example of what Master Raro refers to as “70s Cinema Pastiche”, with The Godfather a portrait of American class mobility toward sedulously bourgeois entrenchment. An immigrant population in the film rises to American middle-class status, complete with hard-won domestic stability (“Don’t forget the cannoli!”), and then its descendants defend their standing with mob violence. Is The Godfather pointedly critical in its social analysis or merely descriptive of a self-limiting status quo? (If the latter, the movie’s famed “attack” on native Capitalism through parallel editing would be a bloated red herring, advertising an analytical approach while covertly celebrating a too-comfortable social dead end. This Godfather’s descendants have hit a class ceiling, perhaps through lack of imagination. That would render all the film’s details of mob rise and rule as fetishized power plays.) No wonder the film was popular: how to be guardedly petit bourgeois! Only first-class pop pastiche may escape the slippery slope downward into kitsch, and The Godfather may arrive there courtesy of its anti-Capitalist Big Idea.
It is the absence of attention to dance detail that renders Sophia Coppola’s Gala contribution ersatz. She might do well to study a new blu-ray version of the great Charles Walters film, Good News (Warner Brothers Archive Collection). There are two wonderful dance numbers, brilliantly filmed in Metrocolor: the gloriously un-P.C. “Pass That Peace Pipe” and the classic “The Varsity Drag”. The movie’s choreography is by the Broadway master Robert Alton, and he and Walters undoubtedly collaborated on the filming. The dance sequences are best seen on a large screen, where the color combinations in the costuming can turn psychedelic, but even on a small screen, we are in the hands of real artists.
The attempt by various means to “intervene” in the situation of New York City Ballet has been going on for some time. The use of a “fashion gala” to raise funds is only one example. (The employment of a musical score by Paul McCartney for a lavish Peter Martins ballet would be another.) Sophia Coppola is merely the latest attempted rescue operation. Speaking of Capitalism: N.Y.C.B. may need a self-image free of what appears to be corporate self-doubt. Documenting the art of dance has to involve more than a middle-management hire.
P.H.
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