By Ela Bittencourt
Alexander Payne, Nebraska, 2013
The 51st New York Film Festival abounded in texturally rich family and relationship stories, often matched by bold stylistic approaches. Among the US selections, Alexander Payne’s Nebraska (2013) refreshes the American dysfunctional-family genre with irascible tones evocative of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. In Nebraska, an old man, Woody (Bruce Dern), imagines that the Sweepstakes notice he has received in the mail is a winning lottery ticket. His irrational desire to travel from Montana to Nebraska to collect his winnings persuades his younger son, David (Will Forte), to drive him in. David envisages a bonding father-son trip but, like Franzen’s elderly male protagonist, Woody is no old codger to be coddled. Despite his disorientation, his tongue is sharp, his wit and obstinacy wicked. He doesn’t hide his scorn for his son’s trade as an electronic-equipment salesman, even if his own didn’t bring him fame or riches. Thus begins the burlesque trip through Americana, with David and Woody making a stop in Woody’s hometown of Hawthorne – a vast farmland peppered with churches and dusty, ramshackle gas stations, small towns as ghost-ridden as their denizens are job-starved, cut off from the American promise.
The film’s black-and-white cinematography enhances its delicate nostalgia, a cool elegance of an Ansel Adams still, or perhaps an Edward Hopper bled of colour, with the quaint storefronts, but also with a hardy, picturesque human element of a Robert Frank. The script, by Bob Nelson, is taught, its wisecracks frequent and deadpan. And although Woody’s story of riches leads to a fist-fight and a clumsy theft of the sweepstakes letter by David’s envious, bullying cousins, Nebraska is not so much a tale about the pathetic or the vengeful as it is about family as destiny – the complex baggage of emotional dodgery, betrayal, but also occasional bits of decency that percolate through David and Woody’s interactions.
Joanna Hogg, Archipelago, 2013
A masterful portrayal of brittle family relations may be found in Archipelago (2010), by British filmmaker Joanna Hogg. Hogg has been profiled in the Emerging Artists series, the first time that all three of her feature films have been shown in the United States. In Archipelago, a British family restores to an island of Tresco, part of the isles of Sicily. The country home takes on its own character, its rooms shot in low light, and in controlled pale hues, mostly blues, creating an eerie, wintry backdrop for the family tensions. Hogg has a refined sense of space: in one of the early scenes, the son, Edward (Tom Hiddleston), gives a larger room to his sister, Patricia (Kate Fahy), insisting that he will be fine in the attic; yet the cramped room immediately presages his downgraded state, the claustrophobia of his self-doubt, and his designation, by his more successful sister, to the role of a lost child. A self-deprecating humanitarian, Edward must decide if he will travel on an AIDS-education mission to Africa, leaving behind his girlfriend, an act which his sister deems just another evasion, similar to his writerly ambitions. Hogg’s spatial sensibility extends to the island itself, and she uses its natural elements and sounds to enhance the picturesque, though austere, beauty of the landscape, a chilly Victorian idyll that evokes England rather than Italy’s earthier hues. The chirping of birds is offset by the increasingly heated torment of the family, overshadowed by the missing father figure, whose presence can only be felt when he phones in.
Hogg is interested in how outsiders alter family and group dynamics. In Archipelago, she introduces a young cook, played by a non-actor and an island local, with whom Edward spends much of his time, on one hand propelled by his desire to demonstrate his egalitarian ethos, and on the other, more subtly, to establish an open channel of communication while his own sister repeatedly shuts him out. The film shimmers with humour around social awkwardness, such as when Patricia, the family’s tortured perfectionist, rearranges her family members around a dining room in a restaurant, failing to achieve satisfaction, only to be derailed again by a seafood dish that she vehemently believes to be undercooked. Small details loom large, as Patricia uses the dish as an excuse to challenge her mother, whom she believes to be unassertive in her marriage. Ever so subtly, the characters expose their masks, be it perfectionist, controlling, or self-consciously searching, and then painfully strip them away: We are privy to family dinners and rituals performed for the sake of decor, proprieties upheld as a protective shield against emotion, and the denial of disappointment that stymies personal growth. Hogg’s brilliant use of diegetic sound – the sounds of birds, wind, downpour – creates a syncopated score, which brings out the musicality, the leitmotifs and refrains, of human actions and speech, in a portrait where people and landscape blend in seamlessly, observed from a perspectival distance, not clinical, but far enough to render psychological mutilations funny and absurd, as much as they are wounding.
Catherine Breillat, Abuse of Weakness, 2013
Catherine Breillat also offered a fascinating glimpse at personal dynamics in Abuse of Weakness (2013), starring Isabelle Huppert. Huppert plays a middle-aged filmmaker, Maude, who, after surviving a brain hemorrhage, goes from physical paralysis to willful abandonment when she encounters a con artist, Vilko (Kool Shen), and lets him skim her for large sums of money, while entertaining the idea that she may cast him in her next film. Drawing freely on her own medical ordeal and experience as a victim of fraud, Breillat refuses to present Maud’s case as logically explicable. Maud acts out on a whim, as if to shirk her reliance on others, but reality imposes cruel restrictions on her will. She is bankrupted, and her attempts to exert control over Vilko come to naught. Breillat plays on the idea that one can be conscious of one’s actions, and yet not be entirely in control of them – a psychological state that recalls stupor, and accentuates Maud’s sense of non-self after the paralysis. A commanding female, she is forced to become something other, and her interactions with Vilko swing from playfully sensual to abusive, with at least some of her gullibility coming awfully close to playacting. When Maud’s life unravels, she is brought before the stern family members, who judge her inadequate, relegating her to the role of an indefensible child, as she had been during her convalescence. Against their chastisement, Maud’s acting out stands out as a willful desire to live life to its fullest.
More straightforward in probing relationships was Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013), by Abdellatif Kechiche. Coming on the wings of victory in Cannes, but mired in controversy, from the actresses’ reported distancing from the film’s sex scenes, to the director’s statement, later retracted, that the film shouldn’t be shown, the anticipation at the festival was high. Yet as athletic as the sex scenes may be – Julie Maroh, the author of the comic, The Life of Adèle, on which the film is based, called them ‘clinical’ – the film itself is a traditional story of romantic rapture, not far removed from its recent predecessors, such as Goodbye First Love, starring one of the most talented and hard-working young French actresses today, Lola Créton. Like Créton, Adèle Exarchopoulos, playing Adèle, has the requisite ingénue looks: the artfully messy hairdo, the pouty mouth, which Kechiche fixates in close-ups, most notably in the sleeping scenes that may have, inadvertently, led to murmurs among critics about the presence of the male gaze. The encounter itself between Adèle and her paramour, Emma, hinges on the first, fatal regard, when the two pass each other in a public square. Adèle has not yet experimented with women, and the sight of blue-haired Emma, a slim gamine, perfectly poised on the shoulder of her female lover, startles and intoxicates her.
Abdellatif Kechiche, Blue is the Warmest Colour, 2013
The narrative of Blue… staggers over three hours, with much time devoted to exposition. While the later part of Adèle’s daily life are wonderfully fleshed out, particularly her work with small children as she assumes her role of an authority figure, the earlier scenes of her as a wide-eyed high school student reading French classics and challenging her first romantic prospect, a boy less inquisitive than she is, are recycled tropes. Emma’s aspirations as a young artist lead to banal exchanges at parties, when Adèle sits back, awestruck and intimidated by Emma’s arty friends. By the time we get to the sex scenes –furtive while at Adèle’s parents’ house, where Adèle doesn’t dare present Emma as her girlfriend, more vocally arduous at Emma’s whose parents are cultured and liberal-minded – the sex is the most thoughtful provocation in Blue…, regardless of how clinical it seems to some, or prurient and voyeuristic to others. The usually luminous Léa Seydoux , who has done splendid work in Farewell, My Queen (2012) and in Sister (2012), is a pale ghost in Blue…, an idealized, risqué yet vaguely maternal figure, next to Exarchopoulos’s fleshy and carnal Adèle. How Adèle could play second fiddle to Emma remains one of the film’s mysteries, her own boisterousness radically downplayed in the later parts, though this change may signal the perspectival upheaval that Emma brings to Adèle’s life. But what comes through forcefully, from the film and the sensationalist reactions to it, is how little space the mainstream culture reserves for the exposition of ardent lesbian love.
Finally in Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), Jim Jarmusch presents a vampiric fantasy of an eternal family, conceived in a romantic sense, as a couplet. Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton) are two vampires in love, whose trajectory spans centuries, with the older Emma having outlived not only Lord Byron and Shakespeare, but also the Spanish Inquisition. What sustains the glum Adam, who is down on contemporary civilization, populated by senseless ‘zombies,’ as he refers to humans, is music. Adam is a consummate collector of musical instruments, and Jarmusch poignantly shows how an aesthetic sensibility can sustain us, even through the darkest of times. Eve is more practical and earthy; an eros to Adam’s thanatos, she would rather be seen dancing and enjoying life. Her ‘seize the moment’ luminosity animates the film, which at times settles into a contemplation of the two characters’ loveliness – in this case, considerable, with Hiddleston as a dark-haired Kurt Cobain – without much narrative to propel it forward.
Jim Jarmusch, Only Lovers Left Alive, 2013
If the film is about the immortality granted to artists, it is neither too mournful nor flippant, with Eve as sublime inspiration, akin to Dante’s Beatrice, and as our guide through the circles of Hell. Hell on Earth, in this case, is the economically gone bust Detroit, with rows of boarded houses and a sinister aura, but with musical brilliance, which makes of its decadence a point of pride. For long-lived Eve, Detroit is a city with access to water, and so poised for a renaissance. The scenes in which she and Adam take moonlit taxi rides through the town, taking it in through their dark sunglasses, belong to the most sweetly evocative in the film. Eve’s own home haunts, in Tangier, present the lush possibilities that darkness offers to the senses, from secretive alleys overrun with hashish vendors, to seductive tunes emanating from smoke-filled cafes. As noted by critic Amy Taubin during a Q & A session, Only Lovers Left Alive is ‘an ecstatic film,’ subtly lit, to bring out just the right ratio of chiaroscuro to the prevailing darkness. Jarmusch delights in gentleman-vampire’s dilemmas: procuring blood without killing, the conflicted nature of those whose powerful élan must consume life to fuel their own creative drive. And while the film’s historical perspectivism may wear thin at times, as a metaphor for creation, _Only Lovers Left Alive is a passionate manifesto of art committed to life, yet soaring beyond its limits.