Private Life

  This wonderful, intense domestic drama has topics, conversations, relationships perhaps never shown before in American cinema. As it traces a fractious couple’s arguments and struggles trying to get a baby, it provides rare insights into tensions in a marriage and in its larger community.

  The couple’s dilemma is embodied in gynaecologist Dr. Dordick: Will the conception be by doctor or dick? The latter having failed, a range of alternatives are suggested, rejected, then tried, then lost. (Happily, the film is far too sensitive and tasteful ever to stoop to that level of vulgarity or silliness.) 

Professionally as well as conceptually, the couple have been disappointed in their lives. They live in a small flat in a pre-gentrified NYC neighbourhood. 

Richard (Dick, for long) was a brilliant off-Broadway theatre director until his company expired. Now he sells pickles in a market. He keeps an old Village Voice rave review at hand. (He has only one testicle.) 

Rachel is a writer between books, long obsessed with having a child. This is American brilliance, defeated. The intellectually rich, down at its heels and its mouth. 

And yet they end up representing American entitlement.  For all their inabilities, failures and disappointments, the couple persists unbowed in their quest for parenthood. They feel entitled to become parents, no matter their limitations, their failures.

Indeed, that quest seems to have become their only bond. Their quarrels and their compromises circle around that subject. They seem to have no other connections. They’ve had sex only once in the last year. They alternately erupt, then retreat. 

That obsession makes this modest couple a possible personification of American exceptionalism. This makes the intimate family drama a microcosm of America. Its confidence sapped, its limitations overwhelming, its promised solutions futile and illusory, it stumbles along in dream after dream, defeat after defeat, unable to acknowledge and to accept that some successes are simply not theirs to have. Their deluded quest for their Eden leaves them suspended at Appleby’s.  

A Star is Born (2018)

The key line comes early: “A Jon Peters Production.” Bradley Cooper’s new film closely adheres to the previous Jon Peters version, the one with Barbra and Kris. Very closely. Only out of discretion was this not titled Another Jon Peters Production, Another Star is Born.

Ally’s leggy version of  “La vie en rose” evokes Judy Garland sufficiently for Cooper to have cut her “Over the Rainbow” from the film (it’s still in the credits). His Jackson Maine replaces Norman Maine. But apart from these homages the ’76 version weighs more heavily than the ’54 on this update. (The March/Gaynor nonmusical is out of it altogether). Bradley looks and sounds like and plays Kristofferson. Ally has Barbra’s nose-concern. The score is updated but kindred.

The plot still works. That’s the nature of art, recombining familiar, basic elements, as Jack explains the elemental power of the 12-note core of music: “Music is essentially 12 notes between any octave - 12 notes and the octave repeat. It's the same story told over and over, forever. All any artist can offer this world is how they see those 12 notes. That's it.”

   The songs, lyrics, music and overall production deserve their warm reception. 

But I find the acting plaudits overhyped. If there are any proper Oscar performance nominations here they are Andrew Rice Clay as All’s father and Dave Chappelle as Jack’s friend. They feel real and new to them. The others make only marginal departures from their familiar personae. 

Lady Gaga is a pleasant and impressive surprise, but she remains an image not a fully-rounded new character. To remember what an Oscar-worthy “performance” might be, check out Glenn Close in The Wife. That is a nuanced, intense, deep apprehension of a character on another level altogether. That’s “acting.” Lady Gaga was excellent, but more as a surprising presence than as a fully realized new “being.” 

In my favourite irony, when Ally — in Jack’s view — sells out and accepts her new manager’s showbiz glitz over her simple sincerity, she lets herself be remade into — Lady Gaga. On that SNL show she perfectly matches Alec Baldwin’s persuasive “performance” of himself.

Cooper makes his Jack the centre of this film more than James Mason or Kristofferson were. He gives himself the more fully detailed backstory, with his problematic dad, sibling rivalry and debilitating afflictions. 

When his addictions are described as a “disease” the film is more attuned to our understanding than the 1950s. But the old puritanism persists when brother Bobby assures Ally it was all Jack’s fault. A disease isn’t the victim’s fault, remember? There’s more balance in Jack’s tinnitis, the other physical affliction that he fails to address and treat. 
     I show my age here, but this fine film doesn’t supplant the Garland-Mason one. I hope it encourages younger audiences to check that one out. It may be time “to let the old ways die,” but it’s also the time to revive the best old art. 

The Bookshop

“No-one ever feels alone in a bookshop.” This film revives literature and the literary culture/business as an agent of community. That makes it a bracing alternative to our current world’s creeping tribalism.

When widow Florence Green revives an abandoned, decrepit heritage building to serve as her home and bookshop, she attempts to bring both the old and the current culture to the isolated East Anglian fishing village. As she is welcomed by even the non-readers, the community shows a general decency. 

But that is in effect outweighed by what Coleridge ascribed to Iago: “a motiveless malignity.”  The primary villain is social leader Violet Gamert (the Violet feeling displaced by the Green), the ineffectual lawyer and banker, the traitorous Londoner Milo North and the unseen nastiness that drove Edmund Brundish to become a recluse. We don’t know what drives all that malice; it’s just there, an ineluctable element in the social fabric in that village as in nations.   

Brundish and Florence are drawn together specifically by Ray Bradbury’s dystopian vision of a world that forbids books, Fahrenheit 451, and Nabokov’s controversial Lolita, which at that time fired up the book-banners. The first valorizes the old culture and the second heralds the new. Indeed, just the bookstore scenes recall the vanishing species of … bookstores!

  This film aspires to the condition of the novel. There is a voice-over narrator, unidentified until the end. At least one sequence revives specifically the epistolary novel, advancing the plot through an exchange of letters. 

Some scenes evoke literature, like the pseudo-Edwardian party that Florence enters ill-fitted in her — not red but “deep maroon” — dress. Marooned she feels. The school scene evokes Dickensian cruelty. There are even interludes of novel-like landscape shots, that establish the setting, their metaphors of natural beauty and strength left unverbalized: the trees, the ocean, the blowing tides of a wheat field.

Florence's emotional beach scene with Brundish seems straight out of the Bronte tradition he loathes. Here he comes out of his isolated self to try to help his new friend resist Mrs Gamert’s high-level political machinations.  

  The angry politics may win here, but our defeated bibliophile leaves an impressive legacy. Little Christine — the wild-haired precocious little schoolgirl — picks up her mentor’s mission. Her first action may be destructive. But she outgrows her impulsive violence to advance Florence’s legacy: a large, successful bookstore run by the wild-haired woman she converted to read. One last irony: Will this magnificent woman survive the Amazon attack on independent bookstores?

So Lolita works beyond recalling the prominent literary scandal of the day. The allusion establishes a contrast between the two girls. Christine may have Lolita’s precocity in understanding and appeal. But where Humbert leaves Lolita as a prosaic defeated housewife, all her allure lost, Christine emerges as a strong, self-assured, competent woman of the world, reviving her mentor’s empire of literature, continuing her campaign. 
     Our reflex assumption that this film is yet another of the Brits’ attempt to relive their lost glory takes another shock. This film is written and directed by the Spanish Isabell Coixet. But that’s what literature does: it bridges cultures as it could the classes. 

Who will write our history

Jewish life and death in the Warsaw Ghetto was remarkably recorded and preserved by one history teacher, Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum, and his cadre of dedicated friends who created the Oyneg Shabbes (i.e., “Joys of Sabbath”) Archive. It comprises 60,000 pages of writings, posters, announcements, photographs, product labels, doodles and other memorabilia. This film is based on historian Dr. Samuel Kassow’s book on the archive.

Dr. Ringelblum’s project undertook to record the minutiae of the Jewish people’s lives in Warsaw, from their prewar cultural richness, through the suffering under the Nazi occupation, to the tragic defeat of the uprising. “Will the Germans write our history,” he asked, “or will we?” Leaving it to the Germans would have left the Jews to be eternally defined by German propaganda.

  The intention grew from recording the day to day lives of the Jews in Warsaw, then detailing the gathering storm of persecution, and finally providing evidence for the postwar prosecution. The amassed material was buried in three caches in a cellar bellow a cellar. Recovering the two we have was like an archaeological probe under the ruins of Warsaw. Ironically, a church spire was used to locate the right ruins. Throughout the film, such poetic moments ruffle the wash of horrors.

Though this film is commonly labelled “documentary,” it actually interweaves documentary footage (in black and white) with dramatic reconstruction of scenes (in colour). Polish actors play the historic figures, with American actors (e.g., Joan Allen, Adrien Brody) doing the English voice-over. The  actors read the diaries from the Archive, but they’re still actors playing roles. That certainly does not diminish the realism of the drama, nor its significance and emotional impact.

The film was shot in Poland, Los Angeles and Atlanta. Its languages are English, Polish and most pointedly Yiddish, the momma loshen threatened with extinction. 

It was written and directed by the American, Roberta Grossman, who has worked in film and TV documentary for around 30 years. Her titles include In the Footsteps of Jesus (2003), Women on Top: Hollywood and Power (2003), Homeland: Four Portraits of Native Action (2005) and Hava Nagilla: The Movie (2012). Her own career suggests she may have found some identification with the character who brings us into the film’s world, from the opening narration to the epilogue: Rachel Auerbach, a Warsaw social and arts critic whom Ringelblum persuaded to stay in Warsaw to help run a soup kitchen.  

There’s a curious touch in the title. Dr. Kassow’s book asks the question that inspired Ringelblum’s project: “Who will write our history?” The film drops the question mark. For now we know the answer. The Oyneg Shabbes heroes managed to write the history. This film passes it around.
     We should also observe how timely this history proves to be. It appears when Poland has been attempting to evade its historic responsibility for the Warsaw horrors. Worse, it recalls the kind of racist dictatorship that seems to be stirring itself back into life today.

Eighth Grade

There are so many beauties in this heart-breaking glimpse into contemporary adolescence.

It opens on Kayla’s YouTube video — a halting advice to kids to “be yourself.” Whatever that is, however to be it, that is the mystery engaged. These videos afford Kayla the appearance of confidence, self-knowledge, poise, success, in which her real life falls short.

Kayla’s day begins with her following a make-up instructional video to put on her face. Only then does she video herself waking up (“Ugh!!”). In scene after scene we watch her facial acne gradually reappear under her fading make-up. The film is about preparing a face to meet the faces that we meet. 

It’s also an anthropological record of the smart phone generation. The teens seem constantly plugged in, whether it’s Kayla at dinner or in her bed or the snotty Kennedy and her friend together/apart in the school halls. This constant connection betrays a tragic alienation. 

  Kayla’s scenes with her “shadow,” the four-years-older Olivia and her friends, replay that dynamic at another level. Olivia needs Kayla to be “cool,” “awesome,” to confirm herself. Riley’s backseat seduction attempt is a harsher version of the needy pretending to be strong. Kayla’s humbling there ends her YouTube pretence to grace. 

Her crush Aiden is the wouldbe bad boy, with his cool swagger, mouth-farts and rep for demanding sexy photos. Happily, Kayla abandons her training to give blow jobs and instead settles into the more civilized dinner party with Kennedy’s much nicer cousin Gabe. Over chicken nuggets and fries, across a long dining room table, Gabe and Kayla self-consciously attempt something so old-fashioned, a conversation.  

  This wonderful scene balances the pool party where they met. Kayla didn’t want to go to the party that Kennedy didn’t want to invite her to. The insistence comes from Kayla’s father and Kennedy’s mother. 

At the party Kayla’s slow approach to the pool conveys her excruciating fear, her sense of inadequacy, indeed shame. Her disastrous bathing suit emphasizes the inferiority she feels around those carefree, buoyant beauties. She seems to be trying to hide from that suit. Only Gabe shows any interest in her. He challenges her to a breath-holding competition, then shows off his pool handstand. Their dinner date is a hopeful parallel to this scene.  

As Kayla’s second “time capsule” box suggests, the struggle for a confident identity doesn’t end at any point in school — or any time soon after, as we elders know. Kennedy’s mom’s apparent interest in Kayla’s dad suggest these needs and ploys continue past puberty into adulthood, if not indeed adultery.

  As the film examines Kayla’s age-appropriate self-centredness we don’t learn much about the other characters. In her scenes with her father he tries to connect and she snappishly rejects him. 

They finally connect when he helps her burn her old box of dreams. Sensing her despair, he pours out his own emotions. He recalls his old fears about how he would raise her when her mother left them. He tells Kayla how much he loves and respects her and how confident he is in her ability to handle herself. She leaps into his embrace.   
      This connection should sustain Kayla — until her next everyday challenge. 

Red Cow

Red Heifer would be a more appropriate title. It would replace the implication of bovine insentience with the tribal impulse to eliminate — the ennobling euphemism is “sacrifice” — something natural but irregular. That murder nominally serves the socially constructed “natural”. 

The obvious victim is the freakish red heifer, which is to be sacrificed on Rosh Hashannah to fulfill some biblical injunction. It will be killed, then burned, on the grounds that something unusual must be killed to protect the rather proscriptive version of God’s nature. 

  The other — more central — victim is the 15-year-old heroine Benny whose emerging sense of her lesbianism and increasing political awareness alienate her from her widowed father, Joshua. The first shot fills the screen with Benny’s cascading blonde/red hair. This introduction defines her in sensual, luxuriant terms. This is the natural beauty that here evolves into her lesbian passion, her sympathy for the pent and doomed heifer, her need to escape her father’s strictures and her own inhibitions. In the first shot she is starting to emerge from sleep (i.e., girlhood).

There’s another coming-of-age twist here. Joshua leads a radical movement against the Jewish ban from Temple Mount. As the film is set on the eve of Itzhak Rabin’s assassination, it prefigures Israel’s national shift of consciousness from its initial harmony into a new, internal violence.  

When Benny ultimately flees to Tel Aviv to make her own life amid that liberal modernity, where poems crop up around the corner, her personal quest reflects Israel’s potential shift away from archaic rituals into modern humanism. In contrast, the heifer stays put in its pen, even after Benny has offered her freedom. The question is whether Israel will turn modern or revert to its harsh orthodoxy. 

Though the woman writer/director Tsivia Barkai Yacov properly focuses on Benny, she makes Joshua an equally intriguing figure. He was widowed at Benny’s birth, so perhaps has made her too important a figure in his life. There are shots where his gripping her hand seems too firm. In naming her Benny he has made her his son (Ben) as well as daughter. In that spirit he lays the ritual teffilen with her, a rite not normally accorded women. He is remaking her in his image. 

Joshua admits to her his unfulfilled longing since his wife died, confirmed in his early morning cold bath in the cave. After his bath he first covers his privates, then puts on his skullcap, then his inner talles, then his pants and the rest. That order reveals his total commitment to religious propriety.  

He seems to have invested his emotions entirely into his religion and its political extension, to the point of violent radicalism. This fires his rejection of his daughter’s sexual identity. Because his religious and political extremism has overridden his human values, Joshua rejects his daughter’s lesbianism and independence. 
     He also expels her lover, Yael, the troubled teenager he brought into the community for therapy. She has been cutting herself, for the pain that briefly penetrates her emotional numbness. Joshua punishes both girls for their love, the girl recovering from emotional detachment and his daughter’s awakening.

Blindspotting

This is a contemporary classic opera. As our canonic operas were in their day, this uses an epic story of heightened emotions, poetic expression and musical energy to reflect upon contemporary issues. 

Oakland serves as a microcosm of America’s roiling racism, with trigger-happy white cops, a divided nation and blacks walking a quaking line to preserve their sanity, dignity and safety. It catches the current trickle-down racism.

This is the America that the blacklisted NFL QB Colin Kaepernick kneels at the anthem to protest, at which Republicans cower behind the pretence to patriotism. 

The film tips its hand when Verdi’s drinking song from La Traviata plays behind the opening credits: “let's not waste our time with things that don't give us pleasure. Let's enjoy life, for the delight of love is fleeting and all too brief….”

  Like most of our opera experiences today, for much of the time we don’t know what the characters are saying. That’s okay. The plot, emotions and psychology come through. For the most part this obscurity is due to the strangeness of the street language. 

But one scene is written to let us off the hook: Miles negotiates the sale of a rowboat to a free-wheeling African American stranger. Both speak languages completely foreign to us but — it turns out — also to each other! Unlike the larger communities they represent, they can strike an agreement and understanding with no idea of what the other is saying. The willingness overrides their differences.

  Unlike the Republican nightmare, here the good guy Collin is the African American, trying to get through the last three days of his probation without a lapse that would toss him back into jail. 

  His best friend Miles, the white guy, has the virtue of lifelong loyalty, total freedom from racism but a violent streak, short fuse and inability to foresee and prevent disaster. The film’s question is whether Miles will prove Collin’s undoing or Collin will effect Miles’ redoing. 

The heroes’ respective street argot plays like music, especially when they unleash their wit and musical energy to ex temporize rap. The language is as free-wheeling, energetic and apparently unrestrained as the shooting and editing are. This is one zippy flick. 

Indeed, in Collin’s climactic confrontation with the pathetic white cop Collin’s emotional tirade is a rap song. His art amplifies his emotions, expresses his terribly conflicted ideas — and by finding artistic form provides an alternative outlet to what his pointed gun threatened. This aria gives Collin and his story the soaring of our purest spirit. He makes his point with a poem not the gun.  

The title points to a central theme, our choice between two perspectives within the same frame. 

  Collin’s ex Val is living the same test she demonstrated in her psychology review. There the viewer sees either the two faces on the side or the vase between them. Read the foreground or read the background? Collin calls it “face-vasing.” (Jasper Johns did a famous silkscreen version with two Picassos and a cup.)

Val used to see his best side. Now she first sees the ugliness of his disastrous fight. That ends their love.

But even that perspective is queered. As bouncer Collin was just doing his duty, trying to get the dunk to take his flaming drink back into the bar. Which we see, the positive or the negative, the action or its context, depends upon our given bias. And on our ability to acknowledge and to transcend our biases. 
In its ambition, achievement and nuanced success this could be the best American film so far this year.