You Hurt My Feelings

  Not often that a title so denies the thrust of a film. In this film’s therapy-speak, accusing someone of hurting your feelings evades the reality: You choose to feel hurt. Partners in a successful relationship will assume responsibility for their own responses instead of blaming the other. 

That’s the point of all the family tensions here. The compulsion to be candid is embodied in Beth’s title of her memoir: I Had to Tell It. She felt the compulsion to reveal her parents’ cruel lack of respect of her. “Shit for brains” was one of her daddy’s sobriquets for her. Her candid memoir enabled her escape from the diminution it made her feel. 

In her creative writing class Beth is properly over-enthusiastic about her students’ attempts. But she’s surprised and hurt that none have read or even heard of her book. They dutifully promise to correct that, but any insult is hers to take not what they gave.

Her response to her own son is diametrically opposed to her father’s but equally problematic. In over-praising his potential and accomplishments she undermines his self-acceptance as much as her father did hers. 

Beth’s key “betrayal” now is her husband Don’s praise of her new book, a novel. When she overhears his admission that he doesn’t like the book she feels he has been lying to her. 

But the husband’s defence is solid. He wanted to support her even if the work was not to his taste. The second agent’s sale of the book justifies Don’s support. But Beth is immediately tested again when the blurb on her cover is trumped by a better blurb on the book beside hers. Who says what doesn’t matter as much as how the subject chooses to respond.  

When the couple jocularly recall their false appreciation of each other’s gifts they are reminded that a close relationship may often depend upon such small tactful fibs. So, too, instead of declaring how ugly his facial surgery has left him Beth assures him he will look good when it heals. 

The film closes on a perfect shot. The couple is together in bed again, starting to read their respective copies of their son’s first play. We don’t know how good/bad it will be or how supportive/candid they will be in response. But now they know the balance that’s required and the understanding on both sides.    

In a minor replay of the theme, when Beth’s sister’s boyfriend is fired from his play he resolves to retire from acting. Instead he apparently auditioned for another and enjoys  success. Again, the firing isn’t as significant as how he chooses to respond to it. As the bard put it, Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus.

Don’s counselling sessions work the same theme. Though he feels he is losing his skill and memory, the point again is that the responsibility to work lies with the client not the therapist. The longterm client who can’t afford him anymore attests to Don’s efficacy.

When the mutually hateful couple demand their $33,000 refund they indignantly reject his advice they separate. Their shared rejection of him saves their marriage when his patiently hearing them didn’t. What he says or doesn’t say is not as important as what they work out. 

Perhaps the domestic theme’s clearest exercise is in sister Sarah’s interior design work. When she goes by her own taste her proposed lighting fixtures leave her apparently sophisticated client cold. But her desperate offer of a phallic grotesquerie works immediately. Here as in the psychological issues we can nurse our own abused feelings or try to understand the offending other’s.   

I don’t know writer/director Nicole Holofcener’s work. After this extraordinarily fresh, sensitive, witty intro I must watch for her more.     

Golda (2023)

  This may appear to be the standard political drama. All the women are secretaries. All the leaders, bosses, even the panel of judges whose investigation frames the narrative are men. 

But there is one exception — the eponymous hero, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. 

Between radiation treatments for her eventually fatal lukemia, the chain-smoking, conscience-driven woman negotiates Israel’s skin-of-the-teeth survival of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. 

While the Jewish state’s survival drama predominates there is also a compelling faith in the power a woman can wield in high office. She may recoil from the threat of turning its attacker Egypt into an army of widows and orphans. But that effective possibility wins Israel’s fragile peace with Egypt 

Golda’s effectiveness counters her disclaimer: “I’m not a soldier. I’m a politician.”  Success in the latter requires at least the possibility of the former. For all her grit and sinew, she remains a character of sentiment, emotion, empathy — keynote requirements so often forgotten in leadership.

In contrast to Golda’s wisdom, with even her suppressed gut instincts validated over time, the nation’s vulnerability is as due to the masculine entity as its military successes are. In particular, the nation’s foremost military heroes are here demystified: Moshe Dayan and Arik  Sharon. Their vanity clouds their judgment. 

Unfortunately the film also rings true to Israel’s current predicament. Golda may coerce Egyptian President Sadat into recognizing the state of Israel. But to today’s arab world, especially to the genocidal Palestinian campaign with its global support, the target is “the Zionist entity.” Not even lip-service respect is paid any “Israel,” however legitimate and important an contributor to the world it has proved to be.

Finally, there is the issue of Jewface. Why wasn’t a Jewish actor cast as Golda? Is this an affront to the Jews?

As if casting Helen Mirren could possibly be considered an insult to her subject. Simply, Mirren is magnificent. Her physical transformation — not just the face but the body, the legs, the motion — is matched by the subtlest nuances in feeling, perception, posture, expression. There has not been a better performance this year.

I gather Mirren spent three hours each day at makeup. Sarah Silverman would have taken twelve. The persecution rests.

Arguably the most touching scene is the newsreel clip of the real Golda and Sadat chatting with easy warmth over their peace deal. As she jokes, they’re a grandmother and grandfather enjoying each other. They incarnate Golda’s most famous line: “We won’t have peace till the arabs decide they love their children more than they hate us.” The line is famous enough not to be articulated here. But it drives that newsreel warmth. 

As well, the Golda-Sadat harmony offers that illusory hope that the other arab nations might someday accept peaceful existence with the Jewish state. That, after all, has since 1948 been the crucial reason why the Palestinians have not accepted the statehood they have been offered. They want to replace the Jews not join them. And the world won’t rein them in. Today as in 1973, as in 1948, Israel cannot count on anyone but herself for defence.   

Private Life (2018)

  The last scene of Tamara Jenkins’ marvellous film is at once eloquent and taciturn.

Rachel and Richard — by now far less harmoniously matched than their names — sit in a diner. Their Edenic quest ends at Appleby’s. They’re waiting for — we know not whom. It could be another surrogate who has promised to bear a child for them but — as in their earlier experience — now welches out. Or it could be another candidate with an egg transplant. We don’t know which because we’re not told. 

And that’s because it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that this particular couple, despite all the disappointments and discouragements we have watched them brave, persist in their campaign to have a child. We’re not told whether their adoption plan worked out but we assume that either it didn’t or it wasn’t enough. 

Still, that apparently empty last scene is packed. The couple are continuing their fertility quest despite all the discouragements from their friends and from their own experiences. In their faces and deportment we read a tired hope and conviction, barely surviving their disappointments. 

In the one key action, Richard rises from his seat across from Rachel and moves to her side. That is, he remains committed to her desire despite his own weakened resolve for a child and despite their campaign’s cost to their marriage. They constantly argue. They haven’t had sex for a year. Their two surrogate children — massive mastiff dogs — seem marginal to their lives however fully they occupy the space and time. They are two large voids not fillers.

What’s Jenkins’ view of this indomitable resolve? Does it attest to their character or to their destructive obstinance? Who knows? We’re left to our own reading. To our own disposition. The film allows us to project our conclusion. It reads us by how we read it.  

Clearly Jenkins has a clear-eyed view of contemporary feminism — that is, not just the achievement of opportunity for women but its inevitable costs.

Rachel delayed pregnancy until her 40s because she was intent upon establishing her career as a writer. Now she pays the price for that delay — her own eggs having weakened and the couple’s options reduced. 

Rachel’s dilemma is replayed in Richard’s brother’s stepdaughter Sadie. Dropping out of her extended college career, she too wants to become a writer. But her offer to provide Rachel with an effective egg is defeated by her own weakness. When she’s admitted into a respected writers’ retreat she seems destined to repeat Rachel’s success/failure.

We rarely get such a trenchant film focused on a couple in decline. Even in their careers they are fading. Rachel has her new book appearing, but is outraged by its cover’s misrepresentation. She is helpless to protect that offspring too.

Richard has fallen from a successful off-Broadway theatre director to working in a pickle company.  That job, dealing with shrunken phallic emblems, coheres with his having only one testicle and the discovery his semen has no sperm. Fortunately, no-one calls him the shrunken Richard, “Dick.” But their swinging doctor is a Dordick. The couple’s decline coheres with Jenkins’ sense of the limitations of the success of feminism. However liberated, women remain in thrall to their biology.

After all, bearing children — whether, when, where, how, why — that is the most private of life. 

Cookie's Fortune (1999)

  In this undervalued 1999 comedy Robert Altman once again uses a social microcosm to anatomize contemporary America.  The Easter weekend setting in Holly Springs casts a Christian framework around the seedy Mississippi small town setting.  

That birth/death issue also drives the three central characters. Camille Dixon (Glenn Close)— blending Garbo and the Mason Line— is the classical Southern Belle pretending to purity. The director of community theatre tries to hide the fact that her Aunt Jewel Mae "Cookie" Orcutt (Patricia Neal) has committed suicide. Camille is so assured of her privilege that she runs roughshod over the police crime-scene tapes and assumes she will inherit her aunt’s estate. She even claims co-credit with Oscar Wilde for her production of Salome. Camille falls from inherited privilege to madness. Selecting that play -- however modified -- for an Easter church presentation reveals the white leader's compromised moral sense and authority. Her personal doom reflects the self-destruction and failure of the racist project.

As a result of Camille’s vain machinations, the suspicion of murder befalls Cookie’s closest friend and help, Willis Richland (Charles Dutton). Willis personifies the complexity and delusions of American white supremacism. We’re led to be suspicious of his every action, only to be disabused by his virtue. His night invasion of the mansion is to keep his promise to clean Cookie’s guns. If he steals a mickey of bourbon at night he replaces it the next day. His knowledge completes Cookie's crossword. 

Indeed Willis refutes the myth of America’s racial abyss. His white grandfather sired a huge keyboard of children and grandchildren, a spectrum of whites and blacks. Willis’s surname anticipates Camille’s bequest of her estate to the most legitimate heir, this black man. He was to that manor born.

As Willis refutes the cliche of the shiftless inferior black, Ned Beatty provides an affable humane alternative to the Rod Steiger redneck stereotype sheriff. Beatty’s Lester Boyle immediately knows Willis is innocent by his homespun wisdom. In fishing veritas.  

The third central character is the most ambiguous. Emma Duvall (Liv Taylor) is a vagabond with an instinctive bond with Willis and an equally compelling antagonism both to her supposed aunt Camille and to her putative mother Cora (Julianne Moore). That bloodline proves as fallacious as the assumptions of Willis’s essential difference.

Throughout, human instincts run athwart social expectations. Though Emma is an outlaw, of suspect character and security, her compulsive affair with rookie cop Jason (Chris O’Donnell)  provides a romantic energy and bracing spirit otherwise lacking after Cookie’s suicide. 

Indeed if Camille was counting on getting the fortune cookie she assumed her due, that fortune is as ersatz as Cookie’s fake necklace. The true fortune is the border-crossing relationships that dissolve the vicious faultlines we usually see in Mississippi dramas. On this Easter the humane America is reborn — not least because a child saw and reported the gun hidden among the Easter eggs.  

Lorna's Silence (2008)

  Damn, the Dardenne brothers make fine films. Lorna’s Silence is a placid recording of a woman’s power — but mainly its restriction — with roiling turmoil beneath its surface. It’s challenging to watch because no character invites — or even allows — our emotional identification. Even at the end.

Our obvious impulse is to side with Lorna. The Albanian woman paid the Belgian Claudy to marry her so she could gain Belgian citizenship. That established, she can now get a bank loan so she and her lover Sokol can open their own snack bar. 

Still, they need the $10,000 a Russian will pay to marry Lorna to win Belgian citizenship himself. To rid herself of Claudy Lorna offers him $5,000 for a divorce and fakes his assaulting her as grounds. Despite the obvious tensions in their homelife she tries to help him break his serious drug habit. In one desperate intervention she gets him through withdrawal by having sex.

These citizenship finaglings are orchestrated by the wannabe gang bass Fabio. With his taxi driver front, we are not surprised to find him taking Lorna for a ride. While she only wants Claudy divorced, Favio rigs Claudy’s murder as an overdose. The run of coarse love never does smooth true. 

For all her power in marital citizenship Lorna is radically helpless. Not entirely unlike reality, here men wield the authority and compel the woman’s silence. Fabio runs the show. Even her financial gains are illusory. Fabio retracts his payments when Lorna breaks the Russian deal. Worse, Sokol proves a false lover when he takes back his investment in their project and unconvincingly pledges to meet her in Albania.  

For all her sympathetic efforts to dump Claudy by legal means, she feels guilty at his death. She declines to dispel the cops’ assumption of suicide. Her silence has been an immoral compliance. Powerless in reality, she finds a moral peace in imagining she is carrying Claudy’s child. That possibility shivers the Russian deal and breaks Fabio’s support. 

At the end his henchman is clearly driving her to death. When she flees him she ends up powerless, helpless, doomed — with not even her purse. She hides in an abandoned shack in the forest.  Her fantasy of carrying Claudy’s child is her only sustenance — and an expression of her will and moral responsibility that had been silenced too long. This final delusion allows her a cleansing her reality denied.

Indeed cleansing may be the film’s underpinning metaphor. Lorna works in a dry cleaning business. The staff’s uniforms are nurse-like white. Lorna uses the hospital setting to back up her domestic violence suit against Claudy. She buries her dirty money, then tries to cleanse it by giving it to Claudy’s alienated family. Even the film’s palette serves the metaphor, with its bright patches — whether the blue in the opening shot or Lorna’s wardrobe reds — an arresting relief against the dark background. The colour feels bracing, like a mouthwash.

Indeed, isn’t all that business about getting citizenship through marriage a political form of cleansing, a superficial legitimizing? Only in her final and fatal isolation, with that delusion of continuing Claudy through their imaginary child, can she feel finally “clean.” That’s her tacit scream against her lifelong silence..

Married Life (2005)

  Two decisions determine this film’s perspective on the duplicities and compromises that characterize modern American marriage.

Director Ira Sachs sets the film in the suburban and executive posh of 1949. That’s the golden age of naive illusions about marriage. Peyton Place had yet to puncture the pretence to suburban innocence. The buoyant voice of Doris Day sets off the cheer, promising she can’t give us anything but love, baby. Here the lovers dish out as much duplicity as love.

Hence the gloss and brightness in every domestic scene and the affluence of the business and club settings. Indeed the film evokes the bright style of the master of ‘50s melodrama, Douglas Sirk, attended by his detachment and satiric bite. Of course the historic setting still implicates contemporary marriage as well. Marriage is marriage.

Sachs’ second decision is to cast as narrator the slickest and most dishonourable character,  Richard (the ever-suave Pierce Brosnan). That’s like Iago getting the direct addresses to his audience, which immediately poisons the viewer’s perspective upon the saintly Othello. 

Initially Richard confirms his opposition to marriage. He ends up marrying the chirpy Kay (Rachel MacAdams) himself. To get there he has to betray his prosaic best friend Harry (Chris Cooper), who’s planning to kill his wife Pat (Patricia Clarkson) so he can marry Kay. Richard also helps Pat conceal her illicit affair. Of course Richard serves mainly his own end, to win Kay for himself. Richard initiates the repeated bromide: “I'm not at all certain that one can build happiness upon the unhappiness of someone else”  — especially not someone with our moral sense! 

Despite being a war widow, Kay seems childlike in her wide eyes, glowing hair and smile, and her principal principle: “A woman needs to be loved, and that's true. But it's not the whole truth. She also needs somebody to love.” That’s the ‘50s sense of “the woman’s place.” She’s as ripe for Richard’s seduction as she was to salvage the lachrymose Harry.

The film ends on the neighbourhood’s happy couples playing charades — an apt metaphor for the reduction of love and marriage to shallow performances. After all, as Richard confidently assumes: “Whoever in this room who knows what goes on in the mind of the person who sleeps next to you... please, raise your hand... I know you can't, not honestly.” But if the characters act love enough they may eventually feel it. 

        Finally, Pat and Harry move silently together cleaning up after the guests. Their harmony is as deep as ever, now built upon their respective abandoned passions. That shot — from outside, through the living room window  — echoes the first: Harry’s insubstantial reflection on his high office window, while his duplicitous best friend Richard introduces him and his tale.

Passages

  With Passages Ira Sachs moves to the forefront of current American directors. (Memo to self: Go find his earlier films. Now.)

The narrative frame anatomizes Tomas Freiburg (Franz Rogowski), a German bisexual directing films in Paris. In the first scene he rudely directs a scene, especially nit-picking on a young actor who’s not descending the stars as the director wants. The film chronicles the director’s troubled descent off-(his)camera.

It ends on a full-screen profile of Freiburg bicycling furiously through the Paris streets. He has found he cannot control people in his love-life the way he directs them on film. As he cycles he’s incongruously wearing the tux and bowtie he donned to prepare to take his film to Venice. All dressed up but now nowhere to go. He’s furious because he has just been finally rejected both by the beautiful Agathe (Adele Exarchopoulos) and by his husband Tim (Ben Wilshaw).,

The closing music is a cacophonous amplification of La Marseillaise. That cultural nationalism places the pug-faced hero in the grand tradition of French romantic film stars: Gabin, Belmondo, Depardieu. These unhandsome men had a romantic force that transcends our ordinary schmucks’ moral responsibility.   

The passages of the title refer to the growth of the lovers who come to reject Freiburg. As Tim notes, Tomas tends to fall into an affair upon completing a film. Now he’s hurt by Tomas insisting on describing his Agathe passion to him. Tomas leaves Tim, impregnates Agathje, then turns jealous at Tim’s new affair with a black stud novelist Tomas persuades Tim and Agathe to attempt to manage a trois. Feeling marginalized, Agathe asserts her independence with an abortion.  When Tim orders Tomas never to see him again the Venice honour pales before the director’s isolation.

The cyclist’s resolve and rage show he hasn’t learned a thing. He still tries to bend his lovers to his will, as if he ruled the set offstage as on. He storms into Agathe’s primary school classroom futilely to beg her to return, then extravagantly promises escapes of his desire not hers. He betrays both lovers by not telling Tim of Agathe’s abortion, to exploit Tim’s desire to raise a child. 

His two love-objects are considerable characters in their own right. Tim is a very successful designer, running a large company. If the woman is, as usual, cast in a lower register, Agathe is still an obviously effective primary school teacher. Either could carry their own film so Tomas’s dismissive treatment defines him not them.

Despite his role in the French screen tradition, Tomas is very much a modern lover. He is fully non-binary. There is contagious fervour in his bouts with Agathe. In his post-phallocentricity he gives her a manual orgasm. (Or in today’s parlance is it Digital?). His intercourse with Tim is the most graphic I’ve ever seen on screen. 

And that is the film’s point: Even in this most modern sexually enlightened male there remain a selfishness and drive for power that precludes his genuinely loving. Indeed it’s all in his name. The director has the voyeurism of the Peeping Tom but in his need for selfless submission in love he’s the Doubting Tomas. That costs him the frei (freedom) in Freiburg. That last cycle through France is his solitary confinement.