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Jan. 6th, 2019 09:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chthonic_cassandraRecent movies -
[includes discussion of rape narratives, possible vague spoilers for a few movies]
- Something Wild (1961) - The first half of this is a spare, raw trauma narrative about a young woman living in the aftermath of a sexual assault, and then midway through it changes course and becomes another entry in my baffling ‘traumatic bonding as romance’ series (previously entries include Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter and Pedro Almodóvar’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!). Carol Baker is excellent as the lead and shows off all her Actors Studio-honed skills, but even she can’t sell the captor/captive relationship which takes up the second half of the film, which, as written, misses the right emotional note to make the traumatic bond plausible (and I am a sympathetic audience; I want to believe it). Like Cavani and Almodóvar’s films, it made me feel pretty bad about myself. This is a good essay on it.
- The Favourite (2018) - For once, I’ve seen an exciting new movie while it’s still in theaters! It’s everything it’s being hailed as - sexy, cruel, inventive, daring, pristinely acted. I loved the colors, the use of the space and costumes, the dissolves, the attitude towards power. Really interested angle on what I call (in my head) concubine problems, on different types of coercion. The fact that all the characters in the triangle are women becomes almost secondary, though in fact its immense. I was definitely the target audience (best joke, which assured me of this: the young lord enters the bedroom of the maid; she asks, “Are you here to seduce me or rape me?” Indignantly he tells her, “I’m a gentleman!” “So, rape, then,” she sighs). Still thinking through its use of anachronism, which is complex.
- Fingersmith (2005) - A BBC miniseries adaptation of the novel; really interesting to hold in comparison to the novel itself, and also to The Handmaiden - both bring out very different aspects of the book. This was immensely enjoyable, and I very much enjoyed Sally Hawkins and Elaine Cassidy’s performances as the leads. The direction is good but not always great; similar with the writing. The second half definitely suffers in comparison with the first - the transition between them is difficult to do, and I think the miniseries comes off as slightly incoherent when it fails to engage in a more nuanced way with the Victorian novels and archetypes that Waters is drawing on (Fingersmith, the book, is in fact extremely intertextual, and I think that’s pretty fundamental to what its doing - the asylum episodes in particular, doesn’t work so well without that context). It also isn’t willing to let Sue or Maud ever quite be as cruel as the book does - I saw it right before seeing The Favourite, and the difference in this was stark.
- A Taste of Honey (1961) - A working-class British teenager with a neglectful mother tries to finger her way into adulthood. This was exceedingly realist, and often beautiful, but didn’t go to any of the tonal places I hoped it would. All the tenderness is so sublimated, and that was the point, but it wasn’t what I wanted as a viewer.
- Persona (1966) - Indefinable Bergman film about two women (an actress in a semi-catatonic state, and her nurse) finding their identities blurring together; very classic, but it was one of the only major Bergmans I hadn’t seen before. It’s brilliant, and daring, and the moments of sensuality between the two women (who are famously, splendidly played by Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullman - Ullman in particular I loved) are intense, visceral. I couldn’t quite let myself fall into it, however; there was something in the visuals that felt too bounded, that I wanted to open up wider and more imaginatively. I’m being vague, but that’s the kind of film it is. I still have a lot to think about in it, and about its placement in the rest of Bergman’s work (to which I have had varying reactions).
- The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) - Maximum neorealism! Slow, steady (three hour long), barely narrative film about 19th century peasants in Northern Italy, all made with nonprofessional actors - the farmers who still live on that land, who imitated the probable lives of their ancestors for the production. This is the kind of movie my partner makes fun of me for watching, but, in its slow quiet, it was deeply moving. I had to skip two scenes in which animals are killed (I mean, actually, on screen).
- Army of Shadows (1968) - Jean-Pierre Melville, himself a former member of the French Resistance, directs a taut, sharply acted, elegiac thriller about a Resistance leader and his network trying to stay alive. It took me a little while to get into this, but once I did, I was very fully there. The way this film functions at once as an exciting and deeply moving film in its own right, and also as Melville’s remembrance of his fallen comrades, is startlingly impressive. Very intense.
I also rewatched Masaki Kobayashi’s amazing Harakiri (1962), which was somehow even better on a second viewing (it’s formally just perfect, and its Kobayashi-typical human moral core is vivid and gorgeous) and Arnaud Desplechin’s family comedy-drama A Christmas Tale (2004), which faded a little bit - the acting is still wonderful, and I deeply appreciate the warmth and open possibilities for compromise and connection it represents, but, knowing what was coming, it didn’t gel as much as I remembered.
[includes discussion of rape narratives, possible vague spoilers for a few movies]
- Something Wild (1961) - The first half of this is a spare, raw trauma narrative about a young woman living in the aftermath of a sexual assault, and then midway through it changes course and becomes another entry in my baffling ‘traumatic bonding as romance’ series (previously entries include Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter and Pedro Almodóvar’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!). Carol Baker is excellent as the lead and shows off all her Actors Studio-honed skills, but even she can’t sell the captor/captive relationship which takes up the second half of the film, which, as written, misses the right emotional note to make the traumatic bond plausible (and I am a sympathetic audience; I want to believe it). Like Cavani and Almodóvar’s films, it made me feel pretty bad about myself. This is a good essay on it.
- The Favourite (2018) - For once, I’ve seen an exciting new movie while it’s still in theaters! It’s everything it’s being hailed as - sexy, cruel, inventive, daring, pristinely acted. I loved the colors, the use of the space and costumes, the dissolves, the attitude towards power. Really interested angle on what I call (in my head) concubine problems, on different types of coercion. The fact that all the characters in the triangle are women becomes almost secondary, though in fact its immense. I was definitely the target audience (best joke, which assured me of this: the young lord enters the bedroom of the maid; she asks, “Are you here to seduce me or rape me?” Indignantly he tells her, “I’m a gentleman!” “So, rape, then,” she sighs). Still thinking through its use of anachronism, which is complex.
- Fingersmith (2005) - A BBC miniseries adaptation of the novel; really interesting to hold in comparison to the novel itself, and also to The Handmaiden - both bring out very different aspects of the book. This was immensely enjoyable, and I very much enjoyed Sally Hawkins and Elaine Cassidy’s performances as the leads. The direction is good but not always great; similar with the writing. The second half definitely suffers in comparison with the first - the transition between them is difficult to do, and I think the miniseries comes off as slightly incoherent when it fails to engage in a more nuanced way with the Victorian novels and archetypes that Waters is drawing on (Fingersmith, the book, is in fact extremely intertextual, and I think that’s pretty fundamental to what its doing - the asylum episodes in particular, doesn’t work so well without that context). It also isn’t willing to let Sue or Maud ever quite be as cruel as the book does - I saw it right before seeing The Favourite, and the difference in this was stark.
- A Taste of Honey (1961) - A working-class British teenager with a neglectful mother tries to finger her way into adulthood. This was exceedingly realist, and often beautiful, but didn’t go to any of the tonal places I hoped it would. All the tenderness is so sublimated, and that was the point, but it wasn’t what I wanted as a viewer.
- Persona (1966) - Indefinable Bergman film about two women (an actress in a semi-catatonic state, and her nurse) finding their identities blurring together; very classic, but it was one of the only major Bergmans I hadn’t seen before. It’s brilliant, and daring, and the moments of sensuality between the two women (who are famously, splendidly played by Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullman - Ullman in particular I loved) are intense, visceral. I couldn’t quite let myself fall into it, however; there was something in the visuals that felt too bounded, that I wanted to open up wider and more imaginatively. I’m being vague, but that’s the kind of film it is. I still have a lot to think about in it, and about its placement in the rest of Bergman’s work (to which I have had varying reactions).
- The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) - Maximum neorealism! Slow, steady (three hour long), barely narrative film about 19th century peasants in Northern Italy, all made with nonprofessional actors - the farmers who still live on that land, who imitated the probable lives of their ancestors for the production. This is the kind of movie my partner makes fun of me for watching, but, in its slow quiet, it was deeply moving. I had to skip two scenes in which animals are killed (I mean, actually, on screen).
- Army of Shadows (1968) - Jean-Pierre Melville, himself a former member of the French Resistance, directs a taut, sharply acted, elegiac thriller about a Resistance leader and his network trying to stay alive. It took me a little while to get into this, but once I did, I was very fully there. The way this film functions at once as an exciting and deeply moving film in its own right, and also as Melville’s remembrance of his fallen comrades, is startlingly impressive. Very intense.
I also rewatched Masaki Kobayashi’s amazing Harakiri (1962), which was somehow even better on a second viewing (it’s formally just perfect, and its Kobayashi-typical human moral core is vivid and gorgeous) and Arnaud Desplechin’s family comedy-drama A Christmas Tale (2004), which faded a little bit - the acting is still wonderful, and I deeply appreciate the warmth and open possibilities for compromise and connection it represents, but, knowing what was coming, it didn’t gel as much as I remembered.
