The Bothersome Man (2006)

Jens Lien’s dystopian dream is as Kafkaesque a film as I can recall. The solitary hero Andreas moves through an inexplicable world, sterile, corporate, irrational, and his physical suffering — a lopped off finger, several run-overs by the subway — disappear magically. 

The urban landscape is grey, concrete, a world stripped of taste, colour, smell, any sensual engagement. The sex is easy but empty. He assumes ardor where there is only bemusement. He has an easy success at work as well as with women, nice office, sports car, nice flat, easy affairs. But his dissatisfaction reawakens when he remembers sensations, when he misses children. 

The corporate and Ikea-furnishing city is a kind of penal colony. Escape is impossible. When he digs a tunnel into a colourful kitchen in the outside world, he’s dragged back with but a mouthful of -- Danish.”Everyone here is happy,” he is admonished, before he is brutally carried out and dumped into the more problematic but enlivening reality.

     The opening shot is of a couple in a subway station kissing ravenously. Andreas watches them, unsettled not so much by their passion — we will later deduce — but by their disengagement. Their mouths work as if sucking out lobster but their eyes keep springing open as if even that pretence at passion can’t make them feel alive.
     The film excoriates the welfare state which provides the basics in a deadeningly easy way but stifles individual assertion.

Mr Holmes

Who better than the legendary Sherlock Holmes to measure out not just the power but the limitations of man’s reason.

      At 93, Ian McKellen’s Holmes is fending off senility. The most brilliant intellect stays mortal. He has exiled himself to the Sussex countryside, stung — or bitten? — by his failure to have saved a woman from suicide. His logic was enough to understand her but his emotional detachment cost her life — and left him burying the incident too deep to remember. Now he’s trying to recover it by writing up his last case more truthfully than Dr Watson did.

The film can be summarized in the two lead faces. McKellen’s is a battleground of deep crevices where memories and emotions have been interred. His nose extends and hooks from a life of probing. The face of brilliant Milo Parker’s young Roger is an intense, unmarked, open flare of feeling. As the boy learns deduction from the old master, Holmes learns emotions and engagement from the lad. The relationship teaches the old man as much as the boy.

In the last shot Holmes plants stones in memory of the departed, then marshals their spirit. The famed epitome of Reason adopts a Japanese ritual and spirituality. The god’s eye view establishes his new arena of awareness. 

Holmes’s conversion to emotion was prompted by young Roger’s almost fatal dedication to Holmes and his bees. His feelings for the boy lead to an understanding of the boy’s lost relationship to his dead pilot father. That prompts Holmes to write his Japanese contact a consoling lie: that Holmes remembers the man’s father, was indeed responsible for his failing to return home, and that he made an exceptional contribution by his service to Britain. 

It also prompts Holmes to give his homemaker, Roger’s mother, the emotional support she needs and to will her and her son his estate. Having failed one woman Holmes will not fail this one. As he recovers the case he had suppressed, he’s freed to connect emotionally to others, both the close and the distant.   

The reason vs emotion split has a parallel in Holmes: the film plays him as a real person often at odds with the fictionalized version created by Watson. Here Holmes is a real man quite at odds with the Holmeses that have proliferated since Watson’s. He’s bemused by he contemporary film version he watches, whose Holmes has an utterly empty, vacuous and unlived-in face, compared to McKellen’s. His Holmes lives at a different address than Watson declared, spurns the deerstalker and finds the pipe now reduced to abhorrent prop. 

Both sets of antitheses define the human condition as in tension between opposing natures, ever in need of balance. Its emblem is the gift crystal that freezes both the productive and social bee and its enemy wasp. 

As modern man epitomizes science and reason, it’s in the charred ruins of Hiroshima that this Holmes finds the prickly ash he hopes will revive his memory better than the royal jelly did. Neither works, because the human condition can not be approached or addressed by reason or science alone. What these human powers fall short of is the spiritual that this Holmes addresses at the end. Perhaps his doctor has his number when he cites his “ashley prick” — not a bad emblem for the initially irritable and lifeless Holmes here, before an emotional attachment saves him. 

 

Antares (2004)

The interlocking sexual relationships here find their unifying metaphor in a minor incident shown in long shot, without emphasis. A man trains his dog to fetch, to heel, to leap up and wrestle for a stick. The man’s relationship with his dog replays the issues of control in the three human stories. But the human relationships are all complicated by the power of sexuality. That’s why — as the old man with a mysterious disease remarks — people make fools of themselves.

The nurse’s husband finds his passion in classical music. So she’s ripe for a wild affair with a -- less handsome -- traveling salesman, where they experiment with blindfolding, exhibitionism and an increasingly daring pleasure. Both lovers are overwhelmed by heir sexual  connection; they hardly speak. The lover’s pleasure in his erotic photos of her contrasts to her husband’s walls of classical CDs. They are symptomatically different collectors. His control threatened, the husband erupts when her ostensible night duty interrupts their planned concert, then when a real estate agent stands them up. Their young teen daughter has her own music, to which she practices sultry dancing, exploring her approaching womanhood. 

The young blonde cashier exercises a different power, faking pregnancy to win her Yugoslavian boyfriend’s commitment to marry her. Her fits of anger and jealousy appear to bring him to heel. In fact, he walks her dog as a way to meet his more amenable mistress. But the girl is more damaged and controlled by her moods than her fiancé is, even if he does return after her suicide attempt. 

His mistress is herself struggling to remain free from her violent, obsessive ex. Swaggering, boastful, pleading love and claiming superior understanding, the real estate agent forces himself on her and punches out his rival. Mercifully, he kills himself in the traffic accident that pulls the separate stories together. He’s destroyed by his delusions of manly power, as the blonde is by her manipulative moods that damage her more than her guy. Only the nurse succeeds because — as a healer — she has found what she needs to live fully and follows her prescription. Like her dancing daughter, the nurse uses her sexuality to fulfil herself. 

     The stories are set in an ugly dense housing complex in Vienna. All the stories of animal vitality and the struggle for control play against that dehumanizing setting. Indeed the classical music fan wants to move out, perturbed by the genital graffiti on the elevator walls. His wife finds at least an emotional escape. The violence in all three stories is limned in the title, which suggests the anti-Ares, an opposition to the god of war, the passion of sex and love, which can be as destructive yet more fulfilling. Beats having an obedient dog.

Southpaw

Southpaw reminds us that the pleasures of a genre film lie less in originality than in the quality of the performance of familiar elements. Being old-hat is a challenge not a disqualification.

The plotline is familiar: a boxer is a single father who fights back to regain his child, title, fortune and especially self-respect. He has to fight and win in the social arena as well as in the ring. In Red Skelton’s The Clown the dad was a — spoiler alert — clown not a fighter but in The Champ he’s a fighter not a clown. Different jobs, same story. Different make-up, same emotions.

However familiar the plot, characters, even speeches, this film still packs a punch. Credit the strong supporting cast, especially Forest Whitaker as the second trainer, Rachel McAdams as the winning doomed wife and especially Oona Lawrence as the tough but needy little daughter. Of course, Jake Gyllenhaal is no mug in the leading role. He persuades us both with his rage and his vulnerability. Odd the film wasn’t called Raging Poppa. 

The fight scenes are almost in the same heavyweight class as Scorsese’s incomparable Raging Bull. Much of the film’s dramatic and emotional wallop comes from the crimson clashes, shot in intense closeup with sharp jabbing cuts and our disorientation matching the fighters’. The plot pours the violence out of the ring into the extra-arena showbiz, where another fight causes the wife’s death. 

Billy Hope’s redemption lies in his overcoming his rage and emotional excess. He needs to do that to get back custody of his daughter. He also has to harness his anger to win the climactic fight. He almost loses it — and also the fight — when he lets his opponent’s marital taunt enflame him. 

But he recovers and wins on the strength of his change not just in character but in tactic. First, his new coach trains him to block punches instead of absorbing them in his version of Ali’s rope-a-dope. He also cultivates his surprising left hook — hence the choice of title. Going southpaw is a metaphor for Billy Hope’s radical change of character that redeems him. 

Billy (nee William) toughens his Will to succeed in his Hope, to recover his family. This is prefigured when he has his daughter spell ‘dismantle’ and ‘hopelessness.’ Billy recovers his Hope by dismantling his old character and developing a new strong reach. That’s the new wine this film pours out of the old bottle, its genre source.

     The film’s full use of scantily-clad ring-number beauties leads to another theory. Why are male-centered sports, like basketball, football, and especially boxing, always accompanied by sexy broads?
      There’s an erotic element in watching impressive male specimens groping each other and joining in emotional violence, especially when they’re stripped down as in basketball and boxing. (Hockey doesn’t count here.) The spectacle therefore provides exposed beautiful women to provide a hetero relief — and perhaps save us from acknowledging the homoerotic potential in macho sports. That’s why in bromances — whether Starsky and Hutch, Butch and Sundance, even down to the Ted flicks — one guy always has a girlfriend.
     Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Tangerine

To the list of Great American Christmas Eve romantic comedies now must be added Sean Baker’s brilliant Tangerine.

“Los Angeles is a beautifully wrapped up lie,” the Armenian immigrant tells the cabbie she’s hired to catch her cabbie son-in-law in flagrante delicto. This film explores the underbelly of LA life, not the usual yule flick sentimentality. 

The film opens and closes on two best friends, who happen to be transvestite prostitutes. Sin-Dee is fresh out of jail, having taken a possession rap for her pimp Chester. She buys friend Alexandra a (sprinkled) donut for Christmas and is about to announce her engagement to Chester when Alexandra blurts out his infidelity. 

The narrative intercuts three storylines. The main is Sin-Dee’s quest to track down Chester and his new girlfriend Dinah. Alexandra agrees to accompany her, on Sin-Dee’s pledge not to get dramatic. Alexandra is also promoting her singing gig that night at a bar, where she performs a very touching rendition of Toyland, a Christmas Eve metaphor — like the film’s seasonal fruit title — that is turned to express the growth away from childhood, simplicity and illusions. Of all her friends, only Sin-Dee — dragging along the unwilling Dinah — makes the performance. All the sadder then Chester’s revelation that in Sin-Dee’s absence he’d not only banged Dinah but Alexandra (once) too. 

The third plot follows Armenian cabbie Razmik. He suffers the rigours of his job, including vomiting drunks and a garrulous old man irked by having a woman’s name (veteran Clu Gallagher).  At home Razmik has a pretty young wife, baby girl, dog — and an Old World mother-in-law intent upon destroying the marriage. He finds his own release in going down on transvestite prostitutes, where he can satisfy his homosexual needs under cover of the feminine. He rejects a prostitute when he finds she’s a woman. Even in free America he’s forced to be furtive.

The Armenian cabbie and the trannies share their exclusion from mainstream America, struggling to make a living by servicing the legitimate society. The prosaic cabbie seems drawn to the trannies’ exotica. The film focuses on these fascinating characters, with their colourful, often indecipherable language.
     El Lay is defined by dark streets, active alleys, and colourful signs that suggest this most iconic of American cities has to be read in isolated phrases, not passed through as blithely as mainstream films have accustomed us. All the central figures grab our sympathy, if not all our identification, but the more we see them the more easily our judgmental reflexes slip aside.  We’re in Paul Morrissey country here, where irregular characters struggle to sustain their self-respect and forge genuine relationships.

We’re so drawn into these characters’ world that it comes as a shock when their bubble is broken by a car of larking boys. The real world, the outside LA, intrudes in the form of lads luring Sin-Dee to their window, then dumping a mess of urine on her face and clothes. The girls’ broken friendship resumes in the laundromat as Alexandra helps both to clean Sin-Dee and  to recover her dignity. As the dryer whirrs behind the credits this film asserts the dignity of the LA underclass, usually omitted from your perhaps more traditional Christmas fare.

     Astonishingly, this film was entirely shot on a cell-phone with adaptive lens. Astonishing. Not a line rings false, not a shot falls dull, not a scene but that finds and warms our uncommonly common humanity.

Self/less

Two phrases encapsulate the theme of Self/Less. 

Obviously, the title is the first. A self grows into selflessness. A rampaging egotist — Ben Kingsley as geezer Damian — discovers the virtue and satisfaction of submitting to the well-being of others. The very selfish real estate mogul surrenders his own character to preserve and to free the young man whose body he has taken over (Ryan Reynolds as young Damian).  
Ironically, the last scene is on an island in the Bahamas, where Damian has freed his body to resume the young man’s family life with his wife and the daughter he sacrificed his life to save. The setting evokes Donne’s “No man is an island.” The geezer has learned community and social responsibility.

Which brings us to the second phrase: The Community Coalition is the non-profit public service organization the geezer’s alienated daughter Claire has founded. The original Damian had no time for his daughter because he was too consumed with building his personal empire. When he tries to connect it’s too late. His checkbook fatherhood won’t work. The extension of his life enables him to make an emotional connection — sans checkbook — that he couldn’t in his lifetime. That’s his young body’s last service to him, which he reciprocates by giving up his character’s life for the young man to resume his.

The minor characters replay the theme in slighter ways. The gunsel the villain scientist keeps resurrecting grows more loyal with every new life he’s given. Damian’s longtime partner Martin introduces him to the Frankensteinian “shedding” in gratitude for his success.  Where Damian uses the new science to preserve himself, the ever more generous Martin used it to revive his dead young son. He’s appalled to learn that came at the expense of another family’s loss of their son. The villain scientist claims to be animating a new combination of tissue, but he’s really ending one life to use the body for another. That’s where good science goes bad. That’s also where good politics goes bad: when the innocent are forced to make the sacrifice for the powerful. 

This is a fascinating new take on a classic horror/sci-fi tradition: man’s burgeoning scientific powers enable powers previously the province of the gods. That infernal presumption is imaged in the villain’s death by flamethrower. 

Damian’s last name is “Hale” — unfitting for a man whom we meet when he is far from hale and hearty. His healthy generosity at the end earns his name.

Trainwreck

Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck is a romantic comedy that stakes out a new position in the feminist reworking of American film.

Most obviously, Schumer’s comedy has a candour and profanity traditionally reserved for men. Like her TV show and standup, her riffs are transgressive bawdry. Her candour about cunnilingus, tampons and erections are tabu-turning cases in point.

The three women of Snuff magazine establish the spectrum. Boss Dianna (Tilda Swinton) is the woman executive taught that success requires her to be like a man. Amy seems feminine in comparison, soft, recessive, but still stronger than Nikki, whose nerves — outside the women’s toilet stalls — reduces her to a girlish titter. Nikki apologetically backs into the editorial promotion when Amy is fired for supposedly molesting an underage masochistic male intern. On  this spectrum Amy struggles to find her integral balance of male and female. The two male writers reflect the same contrast between macho and effeminate. 

Naming a men’s magazine Snuff clearly plays with the idea manliness kills. Hence Amy’s line to the super endowed man: “Have you f... before? Where is she buried?” Amy is limited by her masculine traits. She was brainwashed by her father’s conviction that “Monogamy is unnatural.” Where her sister outgrew that mantra to become a fulfilled wife and mother, Amy stuck at promiscuity and insecurity. She has the conventional male fear of commitment, urge to leave after sex, need to control the relationship. 

She reduces her men’s sexuality to her immediate needs. The super-endowed pickup is thwarted when she falls asleep after her brisk orgasm. When her “ice sculpture” boyfriend gets into a quarrel at the cinema she feeds him lines that make him seem gay. 

Amy is saved from her insularity by her interview assignment with sports doctor Aaron (Bill Hader). He’s idealized by his work for Doctors Without Borders and his fame as a major sports surgeon. Here the man plays the nurturing healer role, domesticating the uncontrolled sexuality of — completing the reversal — the woman. Hader’s lunch scene with Lebron James is a male parody of he Women’s Lunch, from their discussion of relationships and emotions to their careful parsing of the check. 

When Dr Aaron is served with an intervention he faces a range of sexual license. The soft, caring Lebron is joined by the very sensitive Matthew Broderick (married to the star of the seminal feminist Sex and the City), the lesbian Chris Evert and — to provide the play-by-play — by the erstwhile cross-dresser Marv Albert. Amy’s intervention is an arranged scene with her step-nephew, who educes her affection for her lost Aaron. 

     Amy wins Aaron back by performing a number with the Knicks’ cheerleaders. She proves her new discipline and her desire to make their relationship work by performing the athletic ritual she initially disdained. She now accepts sports on Aaron’s terms, as an agent of community.  She also performs the persona of female sexuality, the antithesis to her Snuff work. The muscular hunk climaxed when he admitted that from behind she looked “like a dude.” That went with her male life-choice of promiscuity and flight from emotion. To recover her relationship with Aaron she embraces the female role as cheerleader and her new pool of emotions and commitment. Once an emotional trainwreck, she goes on track and pulls into a station.