Evil Does Not Exist

Od course i paid admission hoping there’s a guaranty.  (There isn’t.)

Evil does not exist. Nature exists. Mankind exists. What evil there is — or isn’t — lies strictly among those elements. 

But nature is nature. Outside the moral arena. The deer are timid, avoid humanity, but can be prompted to harsh reactions that may seem evil but — they’re natural. They are self-preserving reflexes not calculated actions. Even at its bloodiest nature remains innocent in its primitive stirrings. “Red in tooth and claw,” nature remains innocent of evil.

Not so humanity  — “man” as non-gendered. Man has moral awareness, moral responsibility, so there lurks and springs the evil. Evil does not exist — except in mankind. If there is any evil it is in man, not nature. 

That’s the point of the opening and closing scenes. They open with a lengthy meditative view up through tree-veined skies, exalted by the score. The first ends abruptly with little Hanna staring up at the skies. The end closes with her dead. As her handyman father, Takumi, bears off her corpse they disappear into the dark forest. They have returned to nature, dust to dust, leaf to leaf. 

        They achieve a greater non-materiality than the skeleton of the gut-shot fawn.

Not so the city slick. The former talent agent is now touting the corrupt company’s greedy plan to spoil the region and the village by developing a sophisticated camping site on the hill above them. The sewage like the water (and like modern corporate urban man) will inevitably run downhill. The moral antithesis to gravity.

At the meeting the company’s two PR touts fail to win the villagers trust. Instead, the two are genuinely moved to pressure their boss to remake the project. Sent back with a hollow pretence to compromise, they decide to convert to the village life. 

The woman is the likelier to succeed because she has a more realistic sense of herself. She survives her violent encounter with the greenery — a sliced palm, like another culture’s stigmata.

Not so the man, who is still seeking a role he can play in life. The marginal actor converted to talent agent. Now one happy stab at log-chopping persuades him to take an even more dramatic life change. 

But his instincts betray him. The climactic scene is harsh and elliptical. His and Takumi’s search for Hanna seems to have reached a happy conclusion. But then Hanna walks toward the majestic stag. Takumi hangs back, trusting to the deer’s natural gentleness. The city slicker panics and rushes to “save” her. That panics the deer, who fatally gores Hanna. 

Takumi, trying to restrain the hapless transplant, wrestles him to the ground, leaving him possibly dead. But he’s too late to save Hanna so he carries  her off, dissolving into the field. The city guy struggles back to life. 

        But then he stumbles and falls, even now unable to merge himself into nature. Dead or alive he hasn’t the self or sensitivity to be the “at one with nature” he deluded himself he could become. The loner in the human world remains isolated in the field. What life he may still muster is doomed by his guilt about Hanna. 

Arthur Newman (2012)

  This is director Dante Ariola’s dark psychological plumbing of the screwball comedy. You know, like Bringing Up Baby aka What’s Up Doc? Uptight white male hero meets freewheeling femme whacko and it’s love … at the end of the disastrous trail.

Here the laughs are light. This is a sombre examination of identities, how we find them, why we need them, how we’re both bound to them yet compelled to flee them. How we can/can’t recover one.

Wallace Avery starts with a shattered identity. He was a very promising amateur golfer but fell apart on the pro circuit. His golf identity eroded his function first as a husband and more hurtfully as a father. Now he’s a Fed Ex functionary with a one-way committed girlfriend. Cut off from his son, he created a room for him, a shrine the kid has never seen. The connection defines the distance between them.

When he can’t live up to his role as golfer, dad, lover, businessman, what does a guy do? Make himself a Newman (pause halfway thru). Arthur J., to be precise. Wallace fakes his death — by drowning, aptly, for a drama about immersions as self — and drives off to a casually promised job as a Terre Haute private golf course pro.

He’s barely on the road when he encounters Mike — a woman really named Charlotte, but you know how shifty identity can be. Clearly Arthur/Wallace and Mike/Charlotte have something in common and will hotly hit the sack before you can say QED.

Mike is introduced vandalizing her lover’s wife’s car, on some kind of bad trip. Gently concerned, Arthur takes her to the hospital and attends to her there. As they gradually adjust to each other their relationship continues but stiffly, with many jabs and no caresses. Turns out she’s fleeing an identity too. With a psychotic mother and a psychotic twin sister (the true “Mike”) , Charlotte is rootless, unfocused, driven, self-destructive.

        In a supporting theme the unconnected couple witness a diabetic man die at  bus station. Wallace tries to revive him. Mike steals his identification, so he dies as an Unknown. Our central couple take a siginificant step towards humanity when they look up the man's widow and deliver the news. More personally, this extremely odd couple stumble into a mode of relationship that will finally get them into bed. Ok, to intimacy. 

But it’s only through their respective shields. Their sex happens only when they role play. They follow strangers, study them, then enter their homes, assume their unwitting hosts’ clothes and identities and finally make the beast with two backs. Well, as they’re playing others it’s maybe four.They’re themselves only when they’re others so when they’re just themselves they can’t get it together.

Until the end. Even there the uniting is a separation. Both return to their abandoned identities because… well that’s who they are. It’s not like in the movies, where you can just play someone else when you feel like it.

Baby Reindeer

You could call Baby Reindeer the Meet Cute Romance on steroids. Or a new chapter in Psychopathology in Everyday Life. I’ll settle for a triple-threat introduction to genius. Richard Gadd wrote this series, directed it and stars as the failed standup comedian who discovers himself through a Wacko Other, the humongous Martha. That’s about as impressive a triple-threat intro as Orson’s Charlie.

In the beginning. The haggard Donny is a bartender who buys a needy woman a drink. He is then alternately tickled and tormented by her stalking him. What keeps him from firmly and finally shucking her is his own guilt/shame/insecurity that derives from his having been drugged and raped by a screenwriter who’d encouraged his hopes to crack the biz.

The stalker’s intrusion into Donny’s life and mind torpedo his romance with the lovely and generous trans, Terri. It also queers his relationship with his ex, Keeley, and her mother, who has let Donny live in her house until Martha’s violence turns threratening. 

The last scene finds Donny alone and miserable in a bar, sans Visa. He killed his standup career by spending his gig on a humiliating confession. That makes him a brief celebrity. But he has nothing and no-one. The handsome young barkeep pays for Donny’s drink.

Now, there is an ambiguous ending for you. Will Donny revive his sanity, hopes and remnants of self-respect by invading the bartender’s life as Martha did his? Will the stalked turn stalker? 

Or is this revelation the necessary step for Donny finally to understand his nemesis Martha and to embrace her, perhaps even romantically, as radically kindred? After all, it was his first intercourse with Martha that finally freed him to make love to Terri. There’s guilt in them that hills but also maybe hope for a prospector?

When he/we learn what her sobriquet Baby Reindeer means we see she is as damaged by a loveless childhood as he was. This couple lives second generation trauma. Martha’s parents always fought. Donny’s vulgar bullying brute of a father was only hiding from his own childhood abuse by a priest. Father and son finally embrace over their respective rapes. Emerging from those traumas, neither the round lawyer Martha nor the skeletal comedian Donny have an easy path to self-knoweldge and self-acceptance. But they’re mad enough to try.

This dense, tense, shocking melodrama ultimately addresses an unexpected corner of our own humanity. It’s remarkable. And in both Jessica Gunning and Richard Gadd gives us two amazing new stars. 

The Juniper Tree (2003)

  To my regret, I lost touch with the work of Quebec actor/director Micheline Lanctot after her wonderful Handyman (1980) and Sonatine (1984). Happily, a dvd sale just produced The Juniper Tree, which she wrote, edited and directed. She also provided the music. It’s a wonderful reunion.

Lanctot’s familiar theme of two sensitive souls meeting across obstacles of class and culture here gets an operatic rendition. The film opens with a poetic reverie — both in word and in abstract imagery — about the savagery of archetypal motherhood. It closes on an operatic summation. In between we get two very dramatic stories about families fractured by passions and loss. 

Lanctot intercuts a two-hand melodrama with an opulent fairytale production of a typically grim Grimm fairy tale. In the titular tale a stepmother beheads her rejected stepson and is eventually killed by the singing bird that has revived the boy’s spirit. A macabre story of fatal passions finds a happy miracle.

In the main plot a maddened mother drowns her two young sons and is saved from a motor suicide by a highway patrolman. But he is as riven as she is. He’s a reformed commune hippy who has found stability and purpose as a cop. But that career choice cost him his hippy wife and access to their two young sons. He deals with the maddened strange mother en route to visiting his sons to explain why he’s gone. The brief encounter compels him to transcend his professional legality. This is itself an ending of fairytale extremity. 

Leads Sylvie Drapeau and Frederick de Grandpre are unfortunately unknown to me, as I have drifted from Quebec cinema. But they are both excellent. 

Wonderful to see the artist Lanctot at her sustained peak.