Asteroid City

   As the end-credit song reminds us, “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.” Wes Anderson’s extravagant confection enacts the variety of dream-lives that buffer — yet illuminate — our “real” life.

The film is a nesting doll of performed fictions. The film we’ve gone to a theatre to see — so far — opens on a small-screen black and white TV image where the host (Brian Cranston) introduces playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) at work. He appears in a small box far away in the small screen. That’s two levels already. His surname evokes yet another, the mythopoeic frontier lawman of the everything’s OK corral. 

A fourth is the stage presentation of that ostensible play, which itself moves from the stage to the backstage, inner-level of presentation. Then the three-act play is itself presented as a reel-life performance in the eponymous small desert town near the atom bomb testing site.

On that level, the preternatural bright colours and stylized action add yet another context: the animated cartoon. The “real” dramatization is heightened into blatant artifice. As if to confirm this context, an actual roadrunner appears briefly in the action and at length in the foreground of the last shot. The “meep meep” is implicit.

That layering of dramatic production embodies our dependence upon fantasies to guide us, especially in a world more than ever shadowed by the elaboration of that atomic threat. The periodic boom and mushroom clouds leave the citizens shaken but not stirred. As thematic luck would have it, among the trailers preceding this screening was that of the more historic reminder of the birth of the atomic threat, Oppenheimer.

Against the cataclysmic paranoia of The Bomb, the film craves community spirit. So Montana defends the alien who briefly reclaims the asteroid that gave the set city its name: “I reckon that alien didn't mean no harm. No, he ain't American. No, he ain't a creature of God's Earth, but he's a creature of somewhere.”

And aren’t we all? Indeed all the film’s characters are creatures of a somewhere not quite real but an entrance towards it. Actress Midge and widower Zack move from separate boxed frames into a passionate refuge from their respective tragedies. Zack’s antagonistic father-in-law learns a lesson in humanity and respect from Zack’s young triplet daughters, their mom transported in Tupperware.

With all this fictional layering we often miss the identities in the most star-studded cast since Altman’s The Player. The likes of Cranston and Norton, Scarlet Johansen, Liev Schreiber, Tom Hanks, slip by virtually unrecognizable. Conversely, Jason Schwartzman appears usually in his bearded role as recently widowed father, then as the clean-chinned actor. This becomes another kind of layering, of the stretch between the real and the fantasy.    

All these layers of performance draw us through the director’s fantasy to remind us of the debt we, the debt that our science, the debt that our governments, owe — to humanity, not to their own advantage. A timely and tragic reminder, that really should wake us up but….

She's Coming Home (2013)

A cheeky pun lies at the core of this challenging Israeli sex drama. The heroine is a documentary filmmaker retreating to her parents’ suburban flat after the end of an affair. She is supposedly writing a script but instead tries out aggressive female roles in an unsympathetic reality. 

In the opening scene collision 33-year-old Michal is rear-ended by an older man, Zeev. That dynamic repeats in their first sex act, her rear penetration. In a third form of back-sliding, psychological regression, the woman reverts to teenage angst in her parents’ cramped home, both in her impulsive behaviour and in her revolt against their authority. 

Their tension over the father’s extra car is pure Teen. The woman sees it as representing her long overdue independence. The father sells his car to an acquaintance rather than help free his daughter. For her part, the mother puts salt in the sugar bowl.  

Ostensibly to research the school scene, Michal sidetracks her screenwriting to enter Zeev’s world. She gets stoned with a high school student for a one-night stand. She attends their grad prom, where she has another violent sexual encounter with Zeev.

This lover personifies the violent patriarchy. As well as being the school principal, he is a Lieutenant Colonel in the army reserve. Both his sexual encounters with Michal end in violence, the first in Zeev’s penetration and the second in his rejection of her advances in the school’s girls’ washroom. For all the freedom Michal's generation enjoys, a patriarchal check persists.

Zeev may seem sensitive in singing his prom ballad, but he is still driven by a masculine authoritarianism. Michal’s father parallels this troubling patriarchy, both when he sees her naked in the bathroom and when he -- like Zeev -- slaps her in a later argument. Similarly, Michal’s mother’s opposition to Michal’s affair seems impelled by her own attraction to Zeev, which she lacks the courage to advance.

Clearly writer/director Maya Dreifuss is an auteur to be reckoned with. In Bikur Holim (2005) heroine Michal (again) suspends her trip to India to broker the troubled relationship between her mother and grandmother, three generations of women in an oppressive tangle. In Highway 65 Daphna is a spirited 40-year-old policewoman working petty crimes in Tel Aviv. Her growing uncertainty in distinguishing reality from fantasy anticipates our Michal’s role-playing, both as a troubled neo-teen and in the hooker act she performs for Zeev. Dreifuss was also one of the five women directors in Heroine (2016), which presented five stories of women struggling in their defining professions: officer, babysitter, nurse, stripper, director. Her present film seems to grow out of the last.

Dreifuss’s film also shares philosophic territory with Hagar Ban Asher’s The Slut (see my analysis on this site). Both explore the societal and biologic limits that oppress women even in modern Israel, which -- apart from the Orthodox extremity -- is the most egalitarian state in the region and among the world’s most open to women’s rights and advancement. By their biological role in reproduction and their societal function in sex their very freedoms only lead back into their restriction.  

I Like Movies

  Writer-director Chandler Levack has delivered a perfect gem of Growing Up teen film. 

        At 17 Lawrence (Isaiah Lehtinen) is traumatized by the recent suicide of his father and his own implausible ambition to get into the $90,000 Tisch film program in New York. If his ambition and film nerdery might qualify him, his secretary mother’s sparse salary and his own narcissism imperil his path.

In foolish hopes of earning his way he takes a part-time job at the Sequels video rental store. The store name accurately connotes the industry faith in remakes and reissues but also suggests the sequentiality of film and life experiences. But we immediately see through the union rep’s promise of a long career in that business. We know what has happened to video rental outlets.

Lawrence finds an illuminating parallel in the store manager, Alana (Romina D’ugo), who confesses that a traumatic casting couch experience in Hollywood drove her from her acting dream to the vicarious world of videos. Thus alerted to his own limitations, and realizing his selfishness in his one school friendship, Lawrence settles into the consolation prize, a $60,000 scholarship to the film program at Carleton. Similarly enlightened, Alana resumes her acting ambition.  Video rentals don’t resolve life’s problems. 

That happy ending incidentally affirms the integrity and value of working in one’s native Canada instead of blindly aspiring to the supposedly superior industry below the 49th. This film is so scrupulously paced, so perfectly cast, so quietly and movingly acted, that it could never have been made in Hollywood. Its final brilliance is in asserting its national values and spirit. In the micro of that theme, Lawrence fiddles with but his buddy completes the grad class memorial movie.

Levack reminds us how joyous a small perfection can be. As a human experience it's way more marvellous than all those Marvel spinouts. This film is good enough to win Levack a ticket to Hollywood. Hope it doesn't spoil him.

The Slut

This sexually explicit drama is of special interest because its lead actress, Hagar Ben Asher, also wrote and directed the film. All superbly.

Only the cell phones establish the contemporary setting of this rural Israeli community. Otherwise its examination of the transactional nature of female sexuality in society could be any time in history.

The heroine's name, Tamar, evokes the Genesis heroine who avenged herself on her father-in-law Judah for breaking his promise of providing the twice-widow with her third husband (after seed-spiller Onan!). Tamar posed as a roadside prostitute to become pregnant by Judah — then exposes him. That falsely accused prostitute undercuts the heroine’s reduction by the film’s (English) title. 

We know nothing of the film Tamar’s past. She works as an egg-seller (aptly enough) and is a loving, responsible mother to her two young daughters. (The Biblical Tamar had twin sons out of Judah.) When her maternal responsibilities allow, she freely gives sexual services to the local men who help her. The bike repairman even provides bikes for her two daughters — her service implicitly in exchange for goods. 

In these transactions Tamar takes various degrees of seeming pleasure and detached interest. She shows no desire for a fuller relationship. These encounters give her fleeting connection and practical benefits. By providing only manual or oral sex she keeps control over the men. But the Hebrew title, HaNotenet, means the more general "giving woman." Consistent with that, the sexual offerings are not on a quid-pro-quo exchange basis. There is rather the atmosphere of individuals giving what they can and getting what they need. It's like sexual socialism.

        Tamar changes when she goes to bed in an emotional, non-transactional way with Shay, the vet who has returned to his dead mother’s home. When she drops to fellate him he pulls her up for a fuller embrace. After the darkness and detachment of her servicing scenes, her full sex with Shay erupts in a golden glow. Now the sex is love. She invites his insemination and thrills him with news she is pregnant. At Shay’s invitation Tamar and her daughters move into his home. His ease with the girls suggest his potential fatherliness.   

So what goes wrong? That she loves Shay is clear from her phone calls and her pleasure at his comfort with her daughters. But her pattern of sexual barter inhibits her break from her past. She delays her users rather than denying them. To put off one client she deliberately spills a tray of eggs (shades of that Onan). Accustomed to using sex impersonally she seems unable to convert fully to the love with Shay. Perhaps frightened of the new emotion, or by her loss of control in the new intensity, she unilaterally aborts Shay’s child and uses his increasing engagement with her daughters to stay away from their home.  

Shay senses her increasing alienation. After he and the girls frolic in a pool he goes to get Tamar. When he spots her with a hastily fleeing partner Shay leaves her there and speeds home. He puts the girls to bed, the older one in his and Tamar’s bed. 

What ensues we don’t know but we see him stripping naked at the foot of the bed. Tamar returns and is shocked by what she sees through the window. We hear heavy breathing. At the least he may be masturbating (Onan again). This is entirely out of character. Perhaps Shay feels himself isolated, perhaps even unmanned by his new domestication, the abortion, Tamar’s infidelity. Perhaps here his sexual aberration parallels Tamar’s debilitating sexual pragmatism. 

After she has roused a neighbour, three men beat up Shay. In the last shot he lies in a foetal curl and she embraces him. The man who has led her back from cold sexuality to love is reduced to a helpless child. 

That finale suggests Tamar’s struggle to sustain love with Shay against the sexual determinism that is woman’s fate. Tamar’s pragmatic use of her sex has compromised her emotional life and freedom. The power she seems to deploy is still her radical restriction. Even in an apparently mutual “use” the male retains the advantage. That the daughters will grow into this dilemma is suggested in the scene where they — however still playfully — explore sexual embrace. 

The opening scene sets this theme. The camera pans across a quiet, pallid country field, arriving at a closeup of the legs of a handsome horse. Suddenly the mare breaks free, leaps a fence and runs wild — only to be knocked down by a motorist. Through the course of the narrative Shay heals the horse, enabling her to run off again. Like Tamar, the horse is a free natural spirit doomed to paying the world’s price on her freedom. As a healer, Shay is drawn to Tamar, but at the end both need each other to heal.   

ROMEO AND JULIET and TWELFTH NIGHT: Oregon Shakespeare Festival 2023

  By taking courageous liberties, this year’s Oregon Shakespeare Festival recaptures the original audience’s experience of the phenomenal bard’s two classics, Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night. For on this matter you have to take liberties to be true.

For there are two ways of trying theatrically to present Shakespeare as originally produced. By the letter: actors in Elizabethan dress, with minimal props and setting. Or by the spirit: minimal props and setting, but with the actors in their contemporary garb. Shakespeare’s original performers did not wear 400-year-old fashions.They wore what their audience wore, the more easily to connect. In wardrobe as in setting, Shakespeare strove for continuity from stage to audience. While his poetry created the imagined world, the wardrobe helped his audience feel at one with it. The imagined world still reflected theirs. As also did the occasional prose intrusion into the poetry.

This year’s Ashland Shakespeare is so trenchantly of our time, with our concerns and our cultural references, that it reflects our lives the way his productions did his audiences’. Specifically, our experience is inflected by both colour- and gender-blind casting. Both make the plays express our times, our political relevance, as they did his.

Of course, in Shakespeare’s day the gender-blind casting inhered in boys playing all the women’s roles. That was a theatrical convention, not strictly political. 

However conventional, though, it enriched the layering of performance and identity. In Twelfth Night, when Olivia loves the boy Cesario, he is really the girl Viola, who is courting Olivia on her beloved Orsino’s behalf. The audience knew (but suspended the knowledge) that a boy was playing the disguised woman. Olivia and Orsino ultimately transfer their love to the other twin.The layering of gender-role was especially appropriate for the play’s original setting, the January 6 conclusion of Christmas festivities, when the citizens cavorted in costume and reversed the usual master/servant roles and liberties.  

The gender-play in Ashland was brilliantly pointed.  Catherine Castellanos was striking  both as the Capulet father and as  Sir Toby Belch. As the figure of firmest familial authority in the former, she also inspired Maria’s spirit of misrule in Twelfth Night. In both roles Castellanos embodied patriarchal swagger and force. Her slugging of the nurse gave poignant motivation for the nurse turning against her beloved Juliet to support her forced marriage to Paris. When her Toby acknowledges the inhumanity in Malvolio’s abuse there is a suggestion of profound change in his apprehension. The feminine conscience so lacking in Capulet briefly gleams in Sir Toby. 

Director Nataki Garrett also cast a woman, Erica Sullivan, as the tragedy’s formal ruler. She plays the Prince as a kind of state governor, with an  ever-present aid to record and prompt, delivering the final decree as if in a television address. While her image flickers on the screen the families’ homes are callously uprooted, a harsh exposure of the government's pretence to responsibility. 

Both colour- and gender-blind casting inspired Donna Simone Johnson’s playing Mercutio and Antonio. In the tragedy, her Mercutio embodies the wispy sprite of the character’s compulsive fantasies. As Sebastian’s faithful friend in the comedy, his nascent femininity adds a potentially erotic inflection to his expressions of love. That hint parallels this production’s Orsino kissing Viola when she is still in Cesario’s garb.     

The African American re-contextualizing of Twelfth Night goes well beyond Johnson’s casting. Director Dawn Monique Williams made Feste the aesthetic center by casting the blues singer Arielle Crosby in that role and setting the play in the classical American blues scene. The festive occasion’s liberties are here imaged in the emergence of African American culture. 

Underpinning the romantic triangle, Twelfth Night presents three attempts to transcend one’s social station. The two comical dupes are white: the pathetically vain courtier Sir Andrew Aguecheek (David Anthony Lewis) and the Puritanical steward Malvoiio (Al Spinoza). Both are humiliated by their presumption to court Olivia (the African American Eunice Woods). By her wit and mischievous spirit Maria alone in the subplot succeeds in advancing herself, winning and wedding Sir Toby, solidifying her place in Olivia’s family. 

While the Ashland comedy celebrates the advent of African American culture, the tragedy is given an equally dramatic shaping by its shift to the society of the homeless. Of course Shakespeare often respected the classic definition of the tragic hero as high-born and powerful. (Lear, Hamlet, Othello, Titus, etc.).  But in Romeo and Juliet he opted for tragic heroes who were young and helpless. 

Director Garrett went a step further here. Eschewing the warring families’ usual wealth, she has them poor, living under a bridge. The Montagues are of no visible abode. The Capulets live in a seedy trailer, so Paris’s wealth and status loom even larger against Romeo’s love. This setting builds on Arthur Miller’s revolutionary notion that even a Willy Low-man can be a tragic hero. His “Attention must be paid” implicitly echoes through the homelessness the lovers fight through here. In short, Mercutio’s plague needs no literal houses. Humanity should not be a matter of class. 

At the end, the director kept Montague’s promise to honour Juliet with a solid gold statue. Its implausibility in this context is all the more poignant. Montague has the proper impulse, a dream of sufficiency, despite lacking the resources to fulfil it. Equally compelling: during the Prince’s public bromides a sterile army dismantles the society’s pathetic homes. The neighbourhood’s banishment is moire sweeping than Romeo’s.

The underclass setting also redefines Friar Lawrence (the African American Tyrone Lawrence). Shakespeare’s friar was already not completely cloistered. He had his horticultural research, which provided Juliet’s useful drug. He also hoped his facilitating the couple’s marriage would unite the warring families. Director Garrett amplifies that worldliness by making the friar a social activist. He runs a church on wheels to provide food as well as services to the downtrodden neighbourhood. In advising Romeo he appears uncertain about what to do, earnest but powerless.

Within the action — he reappears to join the company recital of the summary speech — this friar disappears when he hears the others approaching the Capulet tomb. He abandons Juliet. But Garrett also gives the friar a scene at the very beginning. His van provides the ammo for the initial Montague and Capulet food fight. The friar returns to help clean up the mess. That works as a mime anticipation of his larger role in the drama: nourishing the lovers’ union then trying to clean up the ensuing mess. The device recalls the dumbshow that anticipates Hamlet’s dramatic implication of Claudiius.       

In short, here are two contemporary approaches to Shakespeare that — like the bard’s original productions — use familiar fictions to reflect upon current social conditions and issues. Both effect an intense emotional and intellectual connection.  In performance as in conception both works prove exemplary. One can only hope that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival survives its current financial and administrative challenges and will soon return to its familiar range of offering, in volume as in quality. Meanwhile, for this relief much thanks.