90. Auspicious: The Ballerina, Movie Actresses, and Kawabata’s Three Half-Sisters, reviewed by Cheryl S.
Everything is up in the air. Sandy sent a video of our Joan of Arc solo to the all-woman French ballet company, Le Swing, with a suggestion I be considered for the female astronaut role in their planned Cat Women of the Moon ballet, but we’ve heard nothing back. Paris is silent. The underground news is that Le Swing’s corps de ballet has threatened a strike. It appears some dancers feel that being cast as alien felines is a slur on both house pets and liberated femmes. The possibility that a ballet could be a poetic fantasy doesn’t seem to occur to anyone these days. (After all, some people see their kitties as semi-divine.) As a result, the Parisian Cat Women project is on hold. Poor Albertine – she has no luck over there. And perhaps the company might find room for one visiting American guest artist – me? I have to zoom with Madame Beach about my candidacy and the state of Le Swing in general. The company’s reigning ballet mistress – Izzy Belladonna – is said to be très difficile.
I was hoping there would be some interest across the Atlantic if only to demonstrate to our resident entrepreneur, Louise Ebersdorf, that international ballet companies are actively producing post-Covid. But identity politics seems to have skewed creativity everywhere. Social consciousness is the prevalent theatrical merch, along with full-length story ballets. Our dear Sandy would have liked to have his work shown in Europe (me, too), although he is a biological male, and that may be a sticking point for La Belladonna. I would be ideal – a visiting Yankette.
In the meantime, our cat-wrangler Paco downstairs is unhappy because his wife – Albertine – is currently spending all of her free time (since her return from Paris and the Catalytics implosion) with Professor Wonkoff over in New Jersey, helping him start up his stateside fertility clinic and research center. Paco becomes very depressed when his wife is on leave and he is alone with Louise’s prize-winners. He becomes unafraid of unleashing his aggressive irritability, meowing and hissing at the least provocation -- for example, at a late delivery of the month’s supply of catmint and valerian. Pippa swears that Paco is hooked on the herbals himself. (Murr, Pippa’s pet, benefits from the supplies. This is one spoiled creature!) When Paco is not in a pet, he takes lengthy catnaps. Pippa has advised a hyperactive Louise to try tincture of valerian for deep, dreamless sleep sessions.
Pippa and Master Raro and I have been going to the ballet, catching up with films and reading newly published fiction. Over the holidays I went to New York City Ballet’s The Nutcracker at Lincoln Center. I was particularly struck with the Sugar Plum of Emily Kikta. Kikta is one of the most musically intelligent dancers to be found anywhere. (Perhaps since the debut of this company’s Tiler Peck.) Her Sugar Plum this winter hovered over the score’s details, arranging agreements in the profiling of dance against musical phrases. You sense a luxury of permitted choice-making, so ample is the cushion of her reflexes. I especially enjoyed the way precise qualities of attack were supported by Kikta’s plié. Her dance movement never loses texture because there is an underlying pulse: lift, release, lift, release. For me, this large vibrato in performance is the fabric of classical ballet’s discursive allure. As Pippa pointed out, Kikta’s arabesque is both various and stable, especially noticeable in her effacé silhouette.
Master Raro and I caught Kikta’s Choleric in the company’s The Four Temperaments. Here, her attack is so powerful she seems to shrink the dimensions of the Koch Theater stage. And her contrast in scale was especially noticeable since the rest of the cast was burdened by the dirge-like tempi of a guest conductor. Everyone else shrank in their throttle. What has happened to orchestral standards at NYCB? According to Pippa, Musical Director Andrew Litton is capable of erratic choices in musical support. Kikta’s musicianship threw the issue into high relief. Yet another immediate goal would be to provide her with a cavalier able to handle her physical amplitude. But this is a challenge not only for this ballerina but for several other tall women in the company who are without ready partners.
Kikta’s presence at NYCB is auspicious. Unfortunately, the company no longer marshals choreographers who are skilled at working with women. Its current dance-makers (J. Peck, A. Ratmansky, C. Wheeldon) regularly foreground unisex ensemble effects rather than lead female roles. They advertise choreographic facility rather than its summation in the unique lead dancer: what they give us is Ballet Without Ballerinas. And works without classical dance texture. Do these dance-makers actually enjoy watching this classical art? The evidence suggests not; their tastes lie elsewhere. The revival of Peter Martins’ Hallelujah Junction this winter season indicated one source of the general failure: Martins’ slick exercises in speed and impersonality, which dominated the company far too long. Been there, done that. Beyond the Balanchine repertory, NYCB has trapped itself in an exhausted contemporary aesthetic.
In catching up with this season’s movies, my friends and I have been impressed with the talents of various actresses on the silver screen. The films themselves were of variable quality, but the women in large and small roles carry them. This, too, is auspicious.
Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers is based on a Japanese novel (Taichi Yamada’s Strangers) about a man’s supernatural encounter with Asian “hungry ghosts”. The specters are his parents, who cause him to age prematurely. Haigh’s new film features Adam, a blocked British screenwriter played by Andrew Scott, who visits his suburban ghost-parents in order to come to terms with their premature deaths in an automobile accident. The ghost mother is played by Claire Foy, and her scenes with her grown son are the heart of the movie. We learn little about the background of the various characters in the film, but Foy implies Mum’s history with an unsentimental, varied emotional focus that I found convincing. Talk about incarnating a character based on little more than wispy ectoplasm! The “gay” relation that Adam has with a younger man, Harry (played by Paul Mescal), doesn’t begin to compare with the mother-son dynamic here, and this is thanks to Foy. The male-male sex is presented as a form of therapy for our hero. (Sex as medicine has become a cliché in popular art.) Haigh’s movie Weekend from 2011 is a much better introduction to his film work. I did like the soundtrack, with that Frankie Goes to Hollywood quote that instantly evokes the 1980s.
Maestro is about a woman who allows herself to be devoured by an international culture hero, “Leonard Bernstein”. Since she marries the bisexual musical playboy, the movie’s wife is terminally long-suffering. (I was reminded of the swooning female in that famous kitsch painting “The Kreutzer Sonata”.) Here, the eventually estranged pair are reunited following a fevered performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony. The wife is played by Carrie Mulligan, and the actress brings a steady dignity to the portrait of “Felicia Montealegre”. Mulligan is up against heavy odds throughout the movie. One of them is named Bradley Cooper, its overzealous director-actor in the role of “Lenny”. The movie is Oscar-bait for him, a long valley of tears for actress Mulligan. If you wish to know what the actual Leonard Bernstein was like on and off the podium, Pippa and I can recommend Charlie Harmon’s On the Road and Off the Record with Leonard Bernstein (Imagine Books, 2018). Assisting Bernstein was an education, and Bernstein was a very great educator. You will find that Felicia Montealegre is a spectral visitor in the book as well.
Anatomy of a Fall is about a modern German wife (a writer) whose abusive French husband is found dead after a fall from their chalet’s balcony. Our heroine’s challenge is to prove her innocence in a court of law. The movie worked for me as a crime drama until the eventual revelation of a violent marital fight casts a certain doubt on the woman’s innocence. I found I could not take the film’s depiction of emotional violence used merely for melodrama, especially late in a tense narrative. It not only feels manipulative; realistic physical or emotional violence can throw me right out of a movie. Sandra Hüller plays the wife, and she is very fine. I especially liked the scenes with the wife’s lawyer, with whom she may fall in love. The film is well acted throughout, including a very convincing version of a canine played by a handsome pro named Messi.
Saltburn is about vicious British warfare between middle-middle class students and the upper-middle class toffs at Oxford and environs. The director, Emerald Fennell, has a gift for evocative visuals. Working with her cinematographer Linus Sandgren, Fennell conjures unforgettable individual images that give support to her social satire. But the reason I went to the movie was the presence of Rosamund Pike as the upper-class mother, Elspeth. I will see any film that Pike is in. I’m a dedicated fan. What a wickedly witty actress!
Poor Things features a female Frankenstein monster in an early twentieth-century steam-punk London. The film provides the poor dear with a masculine model for her education: a cliché upbringing, including the Grand Tour, dawning social consciousness, sex education from a libertine (a very funny Mark Ruffalo) and a term slaving in a Parisian brothel, as well as an eventual murder back in merry olde England. Master tells me that the source novel by Alasdair Gray is much more complex in its view of female sensibility. I really don’t enjoy any of the films directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, The Favourite). His choices are too cheaply sensational and predictable. But in the lead role, Emma Stone manages to suggest a furtive feminine querulousness. Hers is an heroic performance victory over very low material.
The most gifted American-born actress currently in movies is Julianne Moore, and she has a fascinating role in Todd Haynes’ new film May December. She plays a married mother who seduces a thirteen-year-old student, is sent to prison, and years later winds up in a Southern suburb married to the fellow. They are surrounded by a middle-class population that keeps the scandal alive in its speculative imagination while condescending to the purchase of her baked goods. The social satire of the film is gentle in comparison to the director’s early movie Safe, which also starred Moore. This actress is the most emotionally transparent and hypnotic native female screen performer since Sissy Spacek. I understand she will soon work on a film with Almodóvar entitled The Room Next Door. It will be his first full-length English language movie. I can’t wait.
The wonderful French stage and screen actress Isabelle Huppert has a role in Francois Ozon’s delightful new comedy Mon Crime (retitled My Very Own Crime for U.S. screens). Set in the 1930s Paris, the movie follows a tyro actress who takes the blame for a murder of a theater lion in order to use the publicity around the trial to launch her stage and film career. American audiences will recognize the basic plot of the classic Ginger Rogers comedy Roxie Hart (or Chicago, in our time). But Ozon evokes period and a place with Gallic lightness of touch. (When did you last see a U.S. film with an equivalent quality? Our movies are heavy and grim.) I especially liked the period costumes which are not only beautiful but look convincingly lived-in. And the film is stolen by Huppert as an aging film actress who claims to be the real murderer and wants her cut. She is hilarious. Master says that Huppert was once attacked as a curse on filmmaking by Pauline Kael in the pages of The New Yorker. (Kael was always better writing about actors than actresses.) Today, Huppert reigns over world cinema. Our native equivalent in film would be Julianne Moore.
Master introduced me to the work of the Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata via the film of his The Sound of the Mountain, directed by the great Mikio Naruse. I subsequently read The Lake by Kawabata and was hooked on his fictions. Now we have a new English translation of his novel The Rainbow (translated by Haydn Trowell, Vintage, 2023). The narrative follows the lives of three half-sisters in Tokyo and Kyoto in the middle of the last century. I take the novel as a kind of intimate state-of-the-nation work. The sisters are the offspring of three mothers, all of whom have been either the wife or mistress of a well-known architect, Mizuhara. The three are: Momoko, whose unmarried mother committed suicide and who was raised by Mizuhara; Asako, whose married mother died at a young age; and Wakako, the youngest, who lives with her geisha-mother in Kyoto. The main emphasis is on Momoko, a woman who lost her soldier-lover, Keita, during the war. Deeply disturbed in the aftermath of Japan’s defeat, she shows sado-masochistic tendencies, which include a series of affairs with young men whom she exploits and then discards. One of them commits suicide, claiming he has been driven to self-destruction by her indifference. Her sister Asako seems without direction in life, will-less in the shadow of her father, her sister, and the times. And Wakoko is young and unformed, perhaps fated for the life of a geisha. She appears to represent a possible future for that part of Japan which is trapped by poverty and the past.
The novel is filled with exquisite descriptions of the Japanese countryside, its temples and gardens, its folk festivals and tea ceremonies. And Kawabata is precise in the psychological details of the relationship between Momoko and Asako, between Asako and her father. The novelist records tensions among the family members that I am not sure have ever before been captured in words. I was reminded of Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters, which was wonderfully filmed by Ichikawa. The two novels bookend each other temporally, since Tanizaki’s story is set in pre-War Osaka and Kawabata’s narrative in the years post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think I will read Kawabata’s Snow Country next.
This master’s nuanced art is in utter contrast to the way cultural memory finds its way into fiction today. I tried to read a new novel set during the Argentine military dictatorship, Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez, but I discovered I could not face the horrors of its supernatural component. In the films Saltburn and Poor Things, I find that contemporary cinema has a way of letting shock-horror overwhelm realistic accounts of social scenes. Why would a female novelist want to dis-involve her readers? In today’s movies, must Ari Aster become the only new model?
It is as though in the avid search for new subject matter, fresh imagination has been replaced by an implausible sensationalism. A coarsening of style traps some artists in the literal and the facile. Not auspicious.
C.S.
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