Friday, August 13, 2021

Petite Solange First Draft

Complete first draft written for In Review Online.

It’s perhaps unfair to say that divorce dramas have had too great a resurgence in recent years. It is by its nature a prime, extreme avenue for filmmakers to explore questions of family, separation, and bureaucracy, but this vehicle for Big Themes can frequently falter if the subject is taken merely on face value, and not burrowed into and inhabited. In that sense, Axelle Ropert would seem to be an ideal director for this sort of endeavor: she directed Tirez la langue, mademoiselle (2013, also known as Miss and the Doctors), one of the finest romantic comedies of recent years, which constantly expanded outward from its love triangle of brother doctors slowly falling in love with the same woman to capture the sense of city life and ineffable connections. Ropert’s newest film, Petite Solange, playing in the International Competition at Locarno, falls under more conventional lines. Its eponymous character, a 13-year-old played by Jade Springer, leads a relatively average life with her parents Antoine (Philippe Katerine), a music store salesman, and Aurélia (Léa Drucker), a theater actress specializing in wronged women, along with her bookish elder brother Romain (Grégoire Montana). Indeed, aside from an evident brightness of spirit, the most distinctive factor about Solange initially is her last name, Maserati, an Italian name inherited from her father which is commented on numerous times throughout the film. But the family begins unhappy, with Antoine engaged in a surreptitious affair with his coworker and Aurélia frequently absent, and only worsens as the film goes on. What sets Petite Solange apart from a run-of-the-mill divorce film, however, is the question of Ropert’s interest. Solange remains front and center throughout the film, with most of the divorce aspect conveyed in overheard shouts, tentative tête-à-tête conversations with her parents, and the normal vagaries of familial interaction. More than anything, this is a patient, quotidian film; for much of it the only substantial shift in these dynamics is Romain practically fleeing to the relative refuge of a graduate degree program. Instead of constant struggle, Ropert opts for a certain creeping sense of unease, a slow evolution in Solange’s character and outlook on life. Sometimes, this runs the risk of cliché: a certain subplot with Solange becoming more and more troublesome in school as a result of domestic stress feels too pat. But more often, Ropert’s signature interest in little subplots, reflecting the unsettled and capricious nature of life, comes through, especially in a tentative flirtation Solange has with a piano-playing bad boy at her school. All of this builds to a sudden release, a rupture in the film’s final twenty minutes that jumps an indeterminate number of years to a greatly changed Solange. Springer’s performance shifts radically in this moment, and it illuminates the extent to which the film principally relies on her initially ebullient presence, along with Ropert’s careful sense of direction and the beautiful 16mm cinematography by Sébastien Buchmann. This is not a radical film about divorce, but it continually demonstrates an interest in burrowing just a little deeper, going in a slightly more interesting direction, and the agglomeration of these choices results in something gratifyingly warm and complex.

Days First Draft

Complete first draft written for Hyperallergic.

Tsai Ming-liang exists in a curious position within the cinephile consciousness. One of the greatest Taiwanese directors and a foremost practitioner of the very loose movement known as slow cinema, which arose in the late 1980s and early 90s, predominately in Asian countries, his feature films all share distinctive attributes — extended, static long takes; frequent presence of rain or water flooding; a patient eye dedicated to a decaying, ultramodern Taipei, where he has set most of his films — that have become so ingrained that it can obscure some of his most interesting recurring elements. In addition, while Tsai himself is well-known, and a certain number of his films are commonly seen, relatively speaking — including Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2013), Vive L’Amour (1994), and Stray Dogs (2013) — others are underseen, lost in the vagaries of poor quality windowboxed DVDs and ultralimited distribution. This isn’t to say that his vaunted aesthetic unity — which, it should be said, is disrupted when needed, such as in the unconventional musical sequences in The Hole (1998) and The Wayward Cloud (2005) — isn’t a key factor of the films, but it is too often favored in comparison to the great narrative unity that his films present. For Tsai is one of the most teleological of directors, concentrating a step-by-step, film-by-film procession focused upon his muse Lee Kang-sheng, who has been in all his feature films, ever since his debut with Rebels of the Neon God (1991). Understanding Lee’s role is crucial, and not just because his distinctive, halting manner of movement and speaking sets a kind of template for all of Tsai’s actors: Tsai is openly gay, and the backbone of his films is his necessarily unrequited longing for Lee, who is straight but often plays a queer character. In effect, the films are tortured by this central relationship, resulting in narratives of outsiders, Lee most of all, longing for some sense of meaning and companionship in a world that is changing before their eyes; the title of I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006) could scarcely be more apropos. Lee’s presence, in addition to recurring male and female actors like Chen Shiang-chyi, Miao Tien, and Yang Kuei-mei, is crucial to this: he plays more-or-less the same character in all these films, initially named Xiaokang but eventually being named just Kang (xiao is Chinese for small). While taking Tsai’s career as a totally coherent continuous narrative isn’t strictly true, it does very much feel like his oeuvre was leading directly to the last two shots of Stray Dogs, a twenty-minute tour-de-force where cinema itself seems to come to a final standstill. It’s no surprise that Tsai initially announced that he was retiring from narrative feature filmmaking after that film. While he has continued to make short and mid-length works in fiction, documentary, and even gallery settings, Tsai kept his promise until Days, which premiered last year in Berlin. One of Tsai’s most stripped-down, direct, and moving works, and one which heralds the start of an exciting new chapter in his career, it was conceived under unusual circumstances for him. Lee was undergoing severe neck pains a few years ago, reflective of Xiaokang’s affliction in The River (1997), and Tsai journeyed with him to film his intense treatments without any specific reason. At the same time, Tsai met a Laotian immigrant to Bangkok, Anong Houngheuangsy, and began filming him as well as he went about his daily work, including extended moments of cooking. From these roots came the first half of Days, which crosscuts between these two strands of footage formed from roughly three years of filming. While these were filmed without any specific concept in mind, they remain as brilliantly shot as any of his films, patiently and lovingly watching these people doing their quotidian tasks. This suddenly pivots at the hour-mark, where Kang and Anong come together in a hotel room for an erotic massage encounter. The effect is stark and entrancing: it has been decades since Tsai had a male lead performance alongside Lee’s continual presence, and to see these two men locked in such intimacy, whether transactional or not, over a period about half an hour, is unprecedented in his work. The summative effect of Days’s elements, especially the long, fading conclusion, is of a melancholy as potent as his other films, but there is something new: a genuine fulfillment, a belief in deep, life-changing connection, even if it is only for a single night.

Wednesday, August 11, 2021

Deep End First Draft

Complete first draft written for In Review Online.

Jerzy Skolimowski had a distinctive output well before he ended up in London. He began his film career in his native Poland with three successive features from 1964 to 1966 — Identification Marks: None, Walkover, and Barrier — which acted as semi-autobiographical accounts of his experiences under the communist system. The first two starred Skolimowski himself as his alter ego Andrzej Leszczyc, both relatively rough-and-tumble films featuring a good amount of tracking shots and evocative shadows, while the latter opted for a more surreal and dreamlike aesthetic. These two approaches were effectively fused in his next film Le Départ (1967), a Belgian film starring Jean-Pierre Léaud as an auto-obsessed hairdresser, which inserted into its pleasurably loose progression various ruptures, including a final projector breakdown as effective as its contemporary Persona. So where does one go after such a decisive break? For Skolimowski, it was to the deep end, or rather, Deep End, his 1970 film and his first effort in the UK. Its focus remains resolutely on Mike (John Moulder Brown), a 15-year-old who gets his first job as a shower room attendant at a public bath, and the object of his burgeoning obsession, his 25-year-old coworker Susan (Jane Asher). In the midst of this central dynamic runs all manner of unnerving, frankly presented encounters and characters, including Susan’s fiancé Chris (Chris Sandford), her lover and Mike’s former physical education teacher (Karl Michael Vogler), and all manner of vaguely or sometimes overtly sinister figures in London society. For Deep End is a film all about sex, or more specifically the absolute terror of sexual perversions, and how quickly it can warp the minds of those around it. This is not to say that Skolimowski is a scold or a prude by any means: he clearly sees sexuality and comfort with it as a spectrum — albeit within a strictly hetero framework, concerning the characters in this film — wherein Mike and Susan are on roughly opposite ends. Mike is very clearly confused by anyone’s advances as long as they don’t concern the woman of his affections, whereas Susan almost sees sex as an a priori, constantly teasing Mike even as his behavior gets more and more unnerving, though there are certain lines drawn for her: she eventually gets fed up with the constant pestering that various men enact upon her, she objects when her fiancé drags her to an adult education film. Like Peeping Tom from a decade before it, Deep End almost sees London as a nightmarish dystopia of sex gone mad, seeing both the bathhouse and the nightlife as a hotbed of strange and unsettling people. Skolimowski’s role here is essentially one of modulation, and he does so here by essentially bifurcating the film. The first half of the film largely takes place in and around the bathhouse, leaving aside the trip to the porn theater, and the interactions that Mike has with clients, including an especially memorable one where an older woman repeatedly pushes his head into her breasts while discussing association football. While sequences like that are willfully extended and acted out in discomfiting long take, the second half takes that strategy and expands it dramatically, first in a 20-minute sequence that follows Mike attempting to spy on Susan and her fiancé, which involves him eating something like ten hot dogs from a Chinese cart owner to give himself a justification for staying in the area, stealing a standee of a nude woman who resembles Susan, and taking refuge with a sex worker with a broken leg, all scored to music from “The Can.” The remaining 25 minutes of the film are taken up by a sequence of even greater absurdity, as Mike and Susan, huddled in the empty pool, boil five large bags of snow in a small kettle and strain it through her stockings in an effort to find her engagement ring’s diamond. What’s emphasized throughout Deep End is the forcefulness of Mike’s teenage fixations, and how they can be expressed in often violent tantrums that go unrecognized until it’s far too late. It’s entirely to Skolimowski’s credit that the final action here is as willfully strange yet visceral as the rest of the film: an almost inexplicable result, augmented by a fundamental damning motivation that resonates with a clanging horror.