Sunday, January 29, 2017

20th Century Women

As the plural title suggests, the film limns the range of woman’s lives in the last century, the century of feminism, its achievement and its restrictions. The release coincided with America having its first chance to elect a supremely qualified and experienced woman president — but opting for a ludicrous, disastrous male. 
Dorothea is the centre, a character of both ambition and suppression. She dreamed of being a pilot but entered the war too late and was grounded. Only in the epilogue do we learn that her next husband fulfilled her desire for a few years of flying before she died of lung cancer. Having wanted to fly herself, her compromised success at the end is being flown, being a passenger. Annette Benning in type and appearance here evokes Amelia Earhart. But in Dorothea, a woman with Earhart’s desires has to play out a different role than the destiny she desired. Earhart had no kids. 
Dorothea also presents an unusual type of mother. The independent spirit that would have suited her flying serves her badly as a mother. At son Jamie’s school she sides with her truant son instead of the principal. She relates to Jamie awkwardly, talking and acting unconventionally then retreating to her maternal role in defence: “”You can’t talk to me like that.” Jamie’s recurrent complaint is that she doesn’t connect to him as a mother. Having borne him at 40, their separating gap is cultural as well as in age and role.  
     She takes in stride the discovery that Julie is sleeping (albeit chastely) with Jamie. She doesn’ t mind or judge either girl’s sexual activity. But at her dinner party she retreats to priggish decorum over Abbie’s “menstruation" and Julie’s recalling her first intercourse. Dorothea’s instincts are for the spirited and free, but she always draws herself back. However free, she's also locked into habit. She keeps smoking because it was considered safe when she started. So too in her scenes at the club and when the colleague asks her out. The contrast between her suppression and the two girls’ openness encapsulates woman’s limited liberation over the century of the suffragette and the feminist. 
Also unconventionally, she enlists her two women tenants’ aid in making Jamie a man. A boy, she avows, doesn’t need a man to teach him how to be a man. Women can provide better models and instruction. Indeed one of 1970s feminism was the questioning of traditional masculinity. What is the good man for the good woman? Julie’s lesson on gratifying women provokes a bully’s assault on Jamie as “a fag” for respecting the woman’s needs. She teaches him (the woman’s strategy) not to confront or challenge another man’s ignorance. Also,  "Guys aren't supposed to look like they're thinking about what they look like."
William is on the cusp of the new manhood. “I know how to get women but I don’t know what to do when I have them.” He’s respectful and sensitive when Abbie comes to him in emotional need for a sexual relatonship. Presumably William’s second wife leads him from his mechanic job to his preferred life, making and selling pottery.
The other women provide variations on Dorothea’s compromised or limited freedoms. Abbie’s mother is a therapist whose only relationship with her daughter is professional. Abbie comes to her group therapy sessions but doesn’t speak to her mother outside them. Or in the ones we see. Relying on her instincts rather than theory, Dorothea is the more effective mother. Julie’s mother also retreats from her in shame or anger.
For the second generation women their new freedoms prove challenges. Abbie is the more aggressive, as we see in her approach to William. Julie is more compliant, submissive, in her affairs. She is so accustomed to sex unconnected to love that she can’t have sex with the boy for whom she really cares. Neither girl finds satisfaction or fulfilment in sex, or drugs, or unconventional relationships. Both undergo contemporary dangers, Abbie her cervical cancer and Julie a pregnancy scare. 
Perhaps Dorothea provides the key summary of 20th Century feminism when she consoles Abbie: “It’s really bad for a while but it will get better. And then it will get bad again. Oh, I really shouldn’t have said that.” 
For all the warmth in this community there remains an abiding insularity. That is confirmed by one narrative strategy in particular. A separate biographical summary is provided each major character in turn. The characters are in the same story but each also has his/her own, a self apart from the plot and its interconnections.  There is a self apart from the characters’ interchanges.
When Dorothea’s old Ford bursts into flame at the supermarket it’s an emblem for the century, with its wars, violence and loss. The film is about the 20th Century as much as it is about its women. The news clips and President Carter’s telling speech about the modern malaise that results from instant gratification foreground the socio-cultural history off the period. For women helped define the century, its advance, its opening out of individual and collective rights, its only partial advance (see election above). Hence the specific setting, Santa Barbara in 1979. Dorothea is the early pioneer, her tenants the future. 
For the characters and the culture alike, social and personal changes challenged people’s available resources and experience. Hence the emblematic description of the untalented punk rockers: “It's like they don't care. They got all this feeling but don't have the tools they need to express it…it all comes out as passion."
     For all the failures of the century the film appends an optimistic epilogue. In addition to William and Jamie, both young women grow on to have families and satisfaction, perhaps in retreat to the traditional female stereotype, perhaps not. Abbie even gets two kids, her doctor having warned her not to have any. The happy ending may seem an anodyne imposed on a saga of fall-shorts and frustrations. Or it may be the logical observation that however we fail as a person or a culture life goes on. We have another chance. We may blow that too, but we have another chance. 

Elle

With his masterful Elle Paul Verhoeven joins the elite — Bunuel, Hitchcock — in seeing how pervasive is the perverse. He extends the explicitness from Hitchcock’s Frenzy as he examines the power of the sex drive in a humanity devoid of innocence. 
Consider the two religious characters. Michele’s father obsessively blessed the neighbourhood children on their way to school. Ordered to stop his blessing, he went mad and slaughtered a host of people — and pets. Neighbour Patrick’s wife Rebecca is pure Christian, saying grace, watching the Pope’s Christmas mass on TV, journeying to witness his visit. But it turns out she’s known all along that her husband has been violently raping Michele — and thanks her for giving him what she couldn’t. In a Bunuelian twist, Michele is first aroused by Patrick when she watches him carrying in the giant manger statues.
Nature seems on the side of the sinful. Michele’s cat witnesses the first rape with neither a squeal or a scratch to defend her owner. The storm rages enough to give Patrick the opportunity to come “help” Michele and try some normal sex with her. But he needs the weather’s rage in himself if he is to perform. 
Paradoxically, the raped woman who was associated with her mass murderer father is attracted to the handsome banker who seems stable and virtuous (at least, Catholic). But that tall dark and handsome hero is the violent rapist who can’t do normal sex. Everything — and everyone — is twisted.
Michele’s response to the first rape is surprisingly cool. She tidies up, soaks herself, then matter of factly proceeds with her life. She doesn’t call the cops because she doesn’t want to renew the police and press situation she suffered as a child. She prepares to defend herself against another attack and seeks among her acquaintances and colleagues any hint who he might be.  When she tells her friends about the rape she retains that shell.
And that’s the point. Her childhood experience of her father’s sin has left her unemotional, detached, even from her own violation. The press called her “The Ash Girl” and now she’s the ash woman — dry remnants, all the fires spent. Whether masturbating at the manger scene or hand-jobbing her best friend’s husband over a waste-paper basket, her sex is functional, free of passion or commitment. She is, after all, Michele LeBlanc. An uncontaminated White, whatever she does or suffers. 
Her analytic remove contrasts to son Vincent’s blind ardor for his bitchy fiancee and the obvious act “his” son is actually black. Michele supports him and tries to advise him but she lacks a motherly closeness. She even wonders if he might be the son of her best friend Anna, whom she let breast-feed him when her child died at birth. 
Michele’s self-awareness and self-acceptance contrasts both to her grotesque mother’s pursuit and use of young men and her ex-husband Richard’s infatuation with a young Yoga teacher — who doesn’t know his novels! 
Sex is an irrational drive towards all these characters’ abasement. As is, of course, the sex Patrick requires of Michele and would likely continue to “enjoy” if Vincent had not stumbled into the scene and killed him. Vincent is as deluded about his mother’s sex life as he is of his own.
Michele has found a more sensible way to join the world of the young than her husband and mother have. Michele runs a hugely successful fantasy game empire that exploits the age’s fascination with and fear of monstrous sexuality. The game scenes point to a society coarsened and savage in its diversions. It also reminds us how all art serves as a sublimation of our most compelling energies and drives. Patrick’s brokerage (like his good glacially blonde Catholic wife) doesn’t give him the fulfilment Michele’s crew of gamers does her.
The happy ending has the ironic sting of Bunuel’s Viridiana. From the sequence of rape, blasphemy and betrayal a new relationship emerges. Having established the inadequacy of sex with her friend Anna’s Robert, her own ex Richard and the violent rapist, now-dead Patrick, and not wishing to sink to her mother’s hunger, Michele walks off with Anna. 
The first time they tried lesbian sex they dissolved into laughter. They have a cozy sleep together here. Whether they go on to a sexual relationship or to a post-sexual intimacy doesn’t matter. That's another movie. They have survived a series of sexual and violent relationships and betrayals. They emerge beaten but unbowed. They’ve survived the destructive powers of sex — and have managed to make a fortune commercializing it for the frustrated adolescents aged 12-76.  They are woman. They are strong. 

Thursday, January 26, 2017

Live by Night

Ben Affleck can make a good, smart film.  In this richly detailed 1920s film noir he uses the genre conventions to anatomize contemporary America. That is, Donald Trump’s America.
The film is framed by the two world wars. Joe Coughlin comes home from the First, disillusioned, betrayed by authority, determined to be an outlaw, despite his father’s being a prominent honest cop. At the end he has survived a gang war, won and walked away from a criminal empire, and lost his two great loves. At a Saturday matinee with his son, he watches a Hitler newsreel. Germany won’t go to war, he assures himself. 
Well, Germany did. WW II waits in the wings. Hitler’s strategies to turn a democracy into his dictatorship seem eerily repeated now. Proving Affleck’s prescience, the first days of the Trump presidency reveal the leader’s suppression of the press, science, education, dissent and the marginalized, the standard dictator’s game plan. 
In a genre film as in water, the flavour derives from the impurities, in the inflections played upon the familiar conventions. 
For example, Coughlin is a modest criminal, content to be a robber, with no ambition to be a gangster. He opts to stay out of the gang war. He’s (literally) a white suit villain which makes him a relative hero in this criminal world. “You realize to be free in this life, breaking the rules meant nothing. You have to be strong enough to make your own.” He eschews selling drugs and women, satisfied to deal just in demon rum and gambling. He also has the will to leave his evil empire behind. 
The film’s identity politics begins with the genre’s familiar clash between the Irish and the Italian criminal worlds. But Affleck digs deeper. Coughlin’s first love Emma is ruined by her inability to overcome not just the anti-Irish bigotry but her own lack of self-respect it causes. The clash between these ethnic groups also points to Trump’s cultivated prejudice against immigrants. 
A more significant inflection is the involvement of the Klu Kux Klan in this film’s criminality. I don’t remember the Klan as a significant player in any other American gangster film. Here it represents the bedrock of racism that persists in American culture and the criminal undertow in society’s more respectable areas, corporate, judicial, social. As the Grand Wizard says behind his cigar-factory desk, “We’re clerks, bankers, police officers, we ain't gotta judge. And if ya gonna fight us, I'm gonna rain bloody hellfire down on you and all you love.” David Duke’s endorsement of Trump and celebration of his win confirm this currency.  
Affleck also adds the strong theme of religious fundamentalism, a pillar of the current Republican platform. Hence the Figgis subplot. 
Chief Figgis is an upfront cop who allows Coughlin a safe territory but also protects his crazed crooked brother-in-law (“dumb as a grape”). To turn Figgis against the overreaching dolt, Coughlin deploys what he knows about Figgis’s pretty young daughter. Her Hollywood dream shattered, the innocent Loretta has fallen into drugs and prostitution.
Loretta’s story reflects upon America’s extremist right puritanism. Having pulled her out of the drug and prostitution scene, her father literally flays the sin out of her, an especially salacious discipline. The whipping is shadowed by her line, “He can’t stop thinking about other men doing to me what he did to my mother.” Here Figgis evokes the Republican moralists themselves busted for gay sex and adultery, the very targets of their righteous rhetoric. Figgis can’t forgive Coughlin for revealing his daughters fate to him, even though it enabled him to save her. He ends his life compulsively muttering “Repent,” then dies trying to kill Coughlin.  
Loretta turns into a moral crusader, sensationalizing her sinful past to win the reputation of a saver of souls. After thwarting Coughlin’s casino plans she privately tells him her own doubts about God and any heavenly afterlife. Then she slashes her throat — on her father’s bed. Her righteousness proves as inadequate as her self-debasement.
From her Coughlin picks up the idea that the only heaven we ever have is this life and we’re messing it up. The heaven on earth is the point of the hero’s two great loves, one ended by betrayal, the other by the intrusion of the righteous madman. So, too, the violent narrative is punctuated with interludes of breath-taking beauty, whether scenes of nature or the elegance of a simple motion. When a man is thrown to his sidewalk death, his hat wafts down elegantly beside him. There is natural beauty, accidental beauty, but we’re turning our one and present heaven into hell.  
     As a reflection upon today’s America, perhaps the film’s key scene is Coughlin’s final confrontation of his mentor Pescatore. Coughlin dismisses the mobster’s pretence to values and honour with a survey of all the communities who are helplessly deceived, exploited, abused and robbed by their systemic overlords. If the thus abused and deprived ever collect their will and force he would not want to stand between them and what they deserve. That energizing of the abused is what Hitler achieved — and what just got Donald J. Trump elected too, despite his utter inadequacy for the office. 

Silence

Silence opens and closes on the sound of crickets. That small sound connotes silence. You only hear crickets when there is no other sound, especially not the sound of man and his cities and his machines. In the silence from man we seek the presence of God.
But there is only silence from God too. Father Rodriguez chafes at the silence of God. Without direct divine instruction man must determine — whether by logic or by faith or accident — what course of action God wants him to take. 
He and Father Garupe assume it's their mission from God to go into alien and antipathetic Japan to find their mentor, Father Ferrera. They seek to disprove the charge of his apostasy. Instead they end up validating it. 
Ferrera is the inadvertent cause of their mission. But he wilfully provides Rodriguez’s salvation when he persuades him to join him, to perform the abandonment of Christianity and to embrace Buddhism. This gamble with their souls saves other Christians’ lives. In contrast, Garupe risks his body to save other Christians — and all are lost. Conclusion: the way to serve the silent invisible God is to serve humanity. Mankind is God’s visible presence.
When Ferrera and Rodriguez serve the fugitive Christian community they have (literally) unearthed in Japan, their function is restricted to ritual, confession and the promise of a paradisal afterlife. For these uncertain promises many are tortured, killed or at best driven into a life of terror. 
Kichijiro races between betrayals and confessions. The crazed animal outsider recalls the Mifune character in Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai. Here he represents the power and futility of the Confession. He earnestly needs it but continually relapses into sin. His subplot scores the shallowness of the religion of ritual. It validates Ferrera’s and Rodriguez’s priorities when they save Christians’ lives by abandoning the performance of their faith. 
There are two key scenes of ambiguity. In one Rodriguez sees a vision of Jesus in the water and hears a voice advising his apostasy. Whether this is a mad hallucination (not without ample cause), the voice of God, the voice of Jesus, the voice of Ferrara — it doesn’t matter. The point is he gets that radical urge, whether from within or without, and it prompts his proper service to man. 
In the last shot Rodriguez is discovered in his flaming coffin to clutch his little crucifix. Within the Buddhist funeral he clings to his Christian emblem and faith.  He has been vigilant not to violate his apostasy, to the point of denying Kichijiro yet another absolution. But in his most secret corner he retains his abandoned faith.
Incidentally, Ferrara bears the name of the count in Browning’s My Last Duchess. In the poem Ferrara is a wealthy Italian Renaissance nobleman, cultured, sophisticated, aristocratic to a fault. The fault is standing on rank and privilege at the cost of feeling and humanity. He has his last duchess killed for not sufficiently respecting his status. Scorsese’s Ferrera transcended his literary parallel by abandoning the letter of Christianity to serve humanity through Buddhism. Serving God through mankind is better than dis-serving humanity in the name of God. 
That gives this film significant contemporary relevance. Its sometimes gruesome assault on Christianity evokes the current slaughter of Christians throughout Muslim countries, especially in the Middle East, where only Israel provides Christians and their religion freedom and support. (Of course that doesn’t deter several churches and many Christians from supporting Israel’s genocidal enemies instead. But that's another movie.) 
The film’s subject Christianity also has a broader relevance. As the two heroic priests subordinate their faith to serve humanity, the Inquisitor becomes the villain for his fervour in abusing humanity to serve Buddhism. As we read today’s headlines we find the film’s theme and dynamic as pertinent to Islam as to Buddhism and Christianity. All religions are susceptible to abusing humanity in the name of their faith. 
     Sad. But reformable?
     The opening scene, once the darkness of the crickets has cleared, reveals a steaming smoky landscape, hilly and arid, with pools of scalding water with which to torture the believers. The 15th Century Japan setting may seem a world away from the Mean Streets of Scorsese’s New York parables. But the theme is the same. Like the smoking dark streets that start Taxi Driver the landscape is an inferno in which man stumbles trying to find salvation amid the temptations of both life and faith — with nary a word from any God.