Irresistible (2020)

It’s a two-word title. With a shift in colour writer-director Jon Stewart isolates the “resist” in “irresistible.” If the larger word suggests resignation the inner one calls for action, for reform. If the body seems a political satire the film concludes with a mule's kick.

The epilogue identifies both the narrative’s central target — the huge amount of money both spent on election campaigns and open to misappropriation and abuse — and a call for a radical transformation of America’s electoral system. It’s broken, every which way, as off-screen Stewart’s brief interview with a federal official affirms. 

The film’s opening sets the national context: Donald Trump’s 2016 surprise defeat of Hilary Clinton. The plot sends Democrat organizer Gary Zimmer to a small Wisconsin town to use a mayoralty race to launch a local hero in the party’s cause. Both parties pour huge bucks and tech resources into the minor election, afraid to lose a potential toehold.

If the plot seems outlandish, wait. It’s a funhouse version of the 2017 special election for Georgia's 6th congressional district, where the two parties and supporting groups blew over $55 million — without the happy ending here.

The local tragedy and several jokes reflect the current national situation. Certainly the town’s crumbling from the loss of its main industry speaks for the nation of small (and large) towns under duress. Both Zimmer and GOP spinner Faith blatantly confess the falsity of the spin-room. In an echo of the Trump lying streak, when Faith bald-faced claims to be from that small town Zimmer caves: “She said it. Now it’s true.” CNN and Fox News both come in for satiric slams. 

But the main drive is the exposure of the system. As Zimmer meets the small town the characters are played as the rubes and hicks we’ve come to expect from the urban pundits. But here the country mice turn the tables on the city mouse. 

When the joke turns out to be on Zimmer it’s also on us. Spoiler alert: they’ve been playing him, exploiting the political system to con big buck donations to save their town. Justice happens but only through a surprise deception and the locals’ exploitation of the Washington (and hence our) dismissive prejudices and false assumption of superiority.  

Why, the two roughnecks even know the diff between a simile and a metaphor! Is no prejudice sacred?

As we expect of Stewart, he inclines away from the Trump party and administration. But he also hasn’t lost his larger understanding that the problem goes beyond the parties, to the system’s abdication of American values and fairness. As Stewart views the nation’s paralysis, waste and dysfunction he utters this plague upon both their houses. 

The Midwife

In Martin Provost’s The Midwife, the title could be plural. While Claire is the actual midwife, having delivered a generation of newborns into the world, her antithetical Beatrice also serves as a kind of midwife when she brings Claire into new life. The rootless amoral wastrel Beatrice breathes new energy, spirit and joie de vivre into the abstemious midwife, pulling her out of her womb of natal duty. 

Beatrice is aided by Paule, the long-distance trucker whose garden abuts Claire’s. When he leads her to a spectacular high panoramic view he repeats the midwife’s instructions at birth: “Breathe. Take a deep breath.” Paule confirms Beatrice’s urge to accumulate as much pleasure as she can as she succumbs to the cancer in her brain.

Another rebirth occurs at the professional level. The clinic is closing for want of funds.  Claire’s colleagues are happily joining an ultra-modern, high-tech and profitable new super-clinic. Claire’s early reluctance to join them is confirmed when her visit discovers that the new tech will make her experience and values obsolescent. 

She rejects that rebirth — a conversion to the technical — and instead renews her faith in the human values of her profession. She will teach her old ways rather than abandon herself to the new. That reaffirmation of herself is itself a rebirth, if rather a renewal than a conversion.

Claire’s son Simon parallels her movement. Not faring well in his plan to become a surgeon, he decides to become a midwife himself. Or as the new world has it: birth technician. This as his own fiancee is pregnant.  

Dramatically, Claire’s last delivery in the old institute is an emergency operation on a young woman whom she delivered 28 years ago — whose life she saved by providing her own blood. “Lucky we had the same rhesus,” she adds modestly, feeling she was only doing her job.

Beatrice hardly seems a likely agent for Claire’s salvation. Beatrice was Claire’s father’s mistress. They spent enjoyable time together until Beatrice’s abrupt departure drove the father to kill himself. Unaware of that event, Beatrice returns hoping to see him one last time before she dies, to make amends. Deprived of that opportunity, she manages to break down Claire’s understandable antagonism and work out a kind of salvation for both.

The drama runs two parallel plot lines: Beatrice’s death and Claire’s renewed interest in life and the pursuit of pleasure. As both heroines leave their respective pasts the last shot seems their metaphoric standin: Paule notes that the old rowboat that was collecting water is now sinking completely away. The water closes serenely over its ruin, closing over it like a lost memory.