Eartha, Arthur, Marilyn, 1957

Posted on January 15, 2015 by sheila

Eartha Kitt Standing at Marilyn Monroe's Table

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When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism (2013); directed by Corneliu Porumboiu

Posted on January 14, 2015 by sheila

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Corneliu Porumboiu is my favorite Romanian director working today, although he’s got some stiff competition from Cristian Mungiu, Calin Peter Netzer, Cristi Puiu …. Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest (I wrote about it here) is a slapstick re-enactment of a television program commemorating the Romanian revolution of 1989, and how it played out (or didn’t) in one particular small town. 12:08 East of Bucharest is hilarious, improvisational, so bitter it stings. The topic is serious, but it is treated with irony, cynicism, and humor. The film is also a perfect send-up of low-rent no-production-value cable access shows, with their anything-goes mentality, suffused with the pompous self-seriousness of having a platform.

When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism is Porumboiu’s latest (and, at least in New York, it’s playing at Lincoln Center for a one-week run.)

The film is about a director making a film in Bucharest. He is sleeping with his lead actress, who is not from Bucharest, but from somewhere else, although she lived in Paris for a couple of years. Director and actress try to hammer out an important scene in the film they are making, the blocking, the justification for said blocking, and whether or not her nudity in the scene is justified. (It sounds like it’s not. My two cents.) There’s other stuff going on: a competition with another director in Romania, who is also interested in the lead actress, long conversations about film and Chinese food and geography and acting, digressions into Monica Vitti and the films of Antonioni (the actress has never heard of Antonioni, and the director says, “That would be like making a life in the theatre without ever having heard of Chekhov.” Actress replies, “I will see the films right away.”), digressions into bodily functions (did he or did he not have an ulcer in the past? Inquiring minds want to know), discussions about limits and how limits form us. We all work within limits, whether we know it or not, whether we care to acknowledge it or not. The limits should be embraced merely because they are the nature of reality. We are formed by the limits placed on us.

Just as 12:08 East of Bucharest prioritizes the HOW of the story (using the amateurish format of local television programming) over the WHAT of the story (the Romanian revolution, the fall of Communism and Ceaușescu) When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism tells its story of forms and limits through the medium of a limited form. The limits placed on the film itself reflect the subject matter, inform it, make jokes about it. Porumboiu filmed in black and white, stark and unsentimental. That’s one limit, removing the possibility of color from the palette. The other limit placed on the film is the daunting shot-lengths. The entire film is made up of only 17 shots, and while the camera does move (on occasion) it’s rare enough that it calls attention to itself. For the most part, we enter a new shot, with a new set-up and location (Chinese restaurant, moving car, apartment, diner) and we stay in that set-up, and watch the scene play out, until it’s time to move on. Everything, the language, the scene work, the possibilities, are hemmed in by the limits Porumboiu places on it. And, in the same way that 12:08 East of Bucharest commented on itself through the form of a cheap local talk-show, mocking the idea that anything can make sense, that anyone has anything relevant to say (about anything, never mind important topics), When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism is in a constant state of self-awareness and self-evaluation, commenting on itself, winking at the audience. There’s an inside-joke feeling to some of it, but that’s part of the insular nature of the film industry.

And so what we get in the first shot is writer/director Paul (Bogdan Dumitrache, who was so unforgettable in Child’s Pose last year – my review here – he played a bratty sulky man-boy), driving around Bucharest with his lead actress Alina (Diana Avramut), discussing the scene they will be shooting tomorrow. This then becomes a conversation about the nature of movies. He talks about the difference between shooting on film and shooting digitally. When you shoot on film, you must accept the limitations. A single take cannot run longer than 11 minutes, he says, because that is the length of a roll of film, and so in many ways it is the limits that helped form cinema as we know it. Shooting digitally could change all that, could open up new possibilities. But Paul can’t help it: he has been formed by the “rules” of the movies as shot on film, all directors have been. As the take continues to unfurl, the street-lamps of Bucharest shimmering past the windshield, the camera placed in the back seat of the car, you start to wonder if this particular take is going to be 11 minutes long. Will this take be an example of what Paul is talking about?

That first scene sets us up for the whole film, with its long one-shots, hemmed in by limitations and form. Form comes up in every scene, in different contexts. Paul and Alina sit in a Chinese restaurant, eating, and discussing the development of Chinese cuisine, as opposed to other ethnic cuisines. Did Chinese food develop in the way it did because they eat with chopsticks? “The Chinese don’t make T-bone steaks,” says Paul. Did the form dictate the content? This conversation goes on and on, with gentle disagreements, and push-back from Alina, as she follows his theory to its logical conclusion. Logic turns out to be relative. Even within a rigid format.

Paul and Alina are having an affair, and that extremely cliched relationship can be seen as an accepted form of behavior, a “form” set up long before these two got together, so that they are stepping into understood roles, complete with unequal power dynamic, and behaving accordingly. Personal agency doesn’t seem to have much to do with anything. Form is ALL.

Later, there is a grotesque long sequence showing an endoscopy, the undulating wincing interior of Paul’s body taking up the entire screen. The doctor explains to the two people in the room what matters in the image: “When filming you put what most interests you in the center, not on the margin.” At that very moment, and throughout the whole scene, Paul, the guy whose interior is wriggling around on the laptop screen, stands on the margin of the room, the margin of the screen. Ba-dum-ching. Content (endoscopy) completely separated from form (Paul the man). No relation.

When Evening Falls is full of visual jokes like that, commentaries on what it is doing, asking us to make connections, to think beyond the frame, to think about the HOW as opposed to the WHAT.

All of this might sound a bit … chilly, perhaps. It is, but it isn’t. It’s a rigorous intellectual exercise, a lampoon of the Romanian film industry, a rather realistic look (actually) at how a director and an actress stumble their way through a scripted scene, questioning every piece of blocking, questioning the emotional motivations behind every gesture (“But why do you go to the door? Why don’t you just go to your bedroom? Why would you take out a lint-brush right after you got out of the shower? Wouldn’t that come later, as you go to put on the dress? Do you overhear the voices in the other room, or do you just assume that you did because you heard them say the lines in rehearsal?” No detail too small, no question unimportant)… the film comments on the nature of film, which is the nature of a completely distorted version of reality in the first place. If a take can only last 11 minutes, and generations of directors have grown up absorbing that limit as The Only Way, then they have allowed their art to be warped TO that limit without even realizing it. And so isn’t the nature of reality itself hemmed-in by forms we might not be able to perceive? Perhaps reality isn’t “out there,” but in here, with us, our backs hunched-in, our heads cramped-down, like Alice in Wonderland growing too big for her own house, the walls pressing in on her. Forces work on us from the outside, and we are not even aware of it.

These issues are presented humorously and yet not lightly. The stakes are pretty high, but the film never loses its dry sense of absurdity and self-awareness.

The meaning of all of it, though, is up for grabs.

Have at it. Porumboiu wants you to.

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The Books: The Redress of Poetry; ‘Speranza in Reading: On “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”,’ by Seamus Heaney

Posted on January 13, 2015 by sheila

On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)

NEXT BOOK: Seamus Heaney’s The Redress of Poetry.

“Speranza” was the pen name of Lady Wilde, Oscar’s fascinating activist/writer mother, a famous woman in her own right. And his father was no slacker either. He grew up in an incredibly accomplished household. His mother was a political firebrand, basically, speechifying and poeticizing the cause of Irish nationalism. She held meetings at their house, she passed out pamphlets, she wrote poetry, she was a major figure. In 1864, an edition of her poems came out, and she dedicated it to her two sons. The dedication really gives a feeling for who she was, and a great snapshot of the feeling in Irish nationalists at that time.

Dedicated to my sons Willie and Oscar Wilde

‘I made them indeed
Speak plain the word country. I taught them, no doubt,
That country’s a thing one should die for at need’

So. That was Oscar Wilde’s famous mum. (Heaney talks about that dedication in his essay.)

“The Ballad of Reading Gaol” is, of course, Wilde’s long ballad about his experiences in prison (full text here). In this essay, Seamus Heaney analyzes the ballad as a poetic form, placing it in its proper literary context. Since the poem is so autobiographical, and it came out of Oscar Wilde’s terrible experience of being imprisoned for sodomy, those facts tend to overshadow the poem itself. Heaney is interested in the poem, what it represents, for Wilde (it is a real break in style), and how it connects Wilde to the very Irish ground from which he sprung, the Irish ground made plain to him by “Speranza.” The “prison ballad” has a long history in Ireland. I suppose prison ballads will have currency in any oppressed people. Wilde wrote it with a clear political intent in mind: to shine a light on the demeaning and inhumane conditions in prison, to perhaps bring about some change in that area.

Wilde had been pretty much apolitical, or at least he had never been political in a specific “let’s bring about change for this particular group” kind of way. His subversive epigrams and his topsy-turvy plays can be seen as political in a way because they up-end the status quo, almost in every line. They lampoon the sacred cows. They make fun of everyone, setting such elaborate and perfect traps that those with pretensions, or silliness, or flaws, literally cannot escape. It’s a brutal kind of humor.

But “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” is a very different Oscar Wilde. It is a broken Oscar Wilde. It is a devastated and crushed Oscar Wilde. (He didn’t survive long after his release from prison. His health had been compromised beyond repair, and of course his spirit had been broken too.)

Those only familiar with his plays will immediately recognize the radical alteration of style. Those familiar with Oscar Wilde’s other poems will also immediately see (just by looking at the thing) that he is up to something different. His poems were usually lush, intricate, with long lines on the page. “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”, on the other hand, looks on the page like Kipling. Little boxy identical verses marching along irrevocably.

In Heaney’s essay about it, Heaney makes a case that Wilde, by “coming back” to the ballad form (and its propagandistic purposes) was “coming back” to the example led by his mother, Speranza, who also had her trials and tribulations in the public court (although not as literal as Wilde’s.) She was in the center of a couple of major scandals, some involving her husband, and she behaved with fierce loyalty and grace. Grace under public fire. (And anyone who attended Wilde’s trial spoke about his magnificence in the dock, how articulate, how inspiring. Like mother, like son.)

Heaney uses Speranza as the jumping-off point to talk about the various versions of “Ballad of Reading Gaol” that had been published (with some rather illuminating edits, the subject still seen as so controversial).

Yeats included it in the 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse, which he edited, and he had done some very interesting edits on Wilde’s ballad. Yeats trying to protect Wilde, even after his death, from his own rhetorical excesses. Heaney goes into that as well, examining the edits and trying to figure out why Yeats decided they needed to go.

Here is an excerpt from the essay I find very interesting. (I love the point Heaney makes in the first paragraph. Yes!)

Excerpt from The Redress of Poetry, ‘Speranza in Reading: On “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”,’ by Seamus Heaney

‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ is Wilde’s poem of human solidarity, his attempt to produce, in Kafka’s great phrase, a book that would be an axe to break the frozen sea in each of us. Bu the literary fact of the matter is that the axe which is still capable of shattering the surfaces of convention is neither the realistic ballad which Yeats fashioned nor the original romantic plea from which he extracted it; it is rather the hard-edged, unpathetic prose that Wilde created in dialogues like ‘The Decay of Lying’ and dramas like The Importance of Being Earnest. His brilliant paradoxes, his over-the-topness at knocking the bottom out of things, the rightness of his wrong-footing, all that exhilarated high-wire word-play, all that freedom to affront and exult in his own uniqueness – that was Wilde’s true path towards solidarity. The lighter his touch, the more devastating his effect. When he walked on air, he was on solid ground. But when he stepped on earth to help the plight of lesser mortals, he became Oisin rather than Oscar. His strength dwindled and his distinction vanished. He became like other men. He became one of the chain-gang poets, a broken shadow of the brilliant litterateur who had once written that ‘Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.’ By the time he wrote the ballad, however, his aim had come to be the telling of the ugly true things:

The vilest deeds like poison weeds
Bloom well in prison-air:
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there:
Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,
And the Warder is Despair

For they starve the little frightened child
Till it weeps both night and day:
And they scourge the weak, and flog the fool,
And gibe the old and grey,
And some grow mad, and all grow bad,
And none a word may say.

Each narrow cell in which we dwell
Is foul and dark latrine,
And the fetid breath of living Death
Chokes up each grated screen,
And all, but Lust, is turned to dust
In Humanity’s machine.

All the same, if the propagandist ballad is not Oscar Wilde’s proper genre, it is still a kind of writing which was naturally available to him from the start. His mother, Jane Francesca Elgee, had begun her writing career in Dublin in the 1840s with a series of fiery patriotic poems published in the Dublin Magazine. Writing under the pseudonym of ‘Speranza’ and under the impression that her family name, Elgee, meant that she was descended from the Alighieri family – as in Dante Alighieri – the future Lady Wilde composed poems that proclaimed a heartfelt sympathy for the plight of the famine victims in Ireland and a firebrand’s enthusiasm for the cause of rebellion against British rule. Speranza herself, of course, was from a well-to-do Dublin Unionist background, so her association with Charles Gavan Duffy and other activists and intellectuals in the circle was already an act of rebellion, an embrace of the forbidden other which foreshadowed her son’s more extreme rejection of the conventional pieties. And Oscar in his turn was very much in favour of the company she had kept. In a lecture which he gave in San Francisco in 1882 during his famous American tour, he was emphatic about his admiration for those revolutionaries of 1848. His lecture notes survive and contain declarations like the following:

As regards those men of forty-eight, I look on their work with peculiar reverence and love, for I was indeed trained by my mother to love and reverence them, as a catholic child is the saints of the cathedral. The earliest hero of my childhood was Smith O’Brien, whom I remember well – tall and stately with a dignity of one who had fought for a noble idea and the sadness of one who had failed … John Mitchel, too, on his return to Ireland I saw, at my father’s table with his eagle eye and impassioned manner. Charles Gavan Duffy is one of my friends in London, and the poets among them were men who made lives noble poems also … The greatest of them all, and one of the best poets of this century in Europe was, I need not say, Thomas Davis. Born in the year 1814 at Mallow in County Cork, before he was thirty years of age, he and the other young men of the Nation newspaper had, to use Father Burke’s eloquent words, created ‘by sheer power of the Irish intellect, by sheer strength of Irish genius, a national poetry and a national literature which no other nation can equal.’

It would have been no surprise if, after this, Wilde had gone on to write a poem of his own called ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times,’ where he might have wanted himself to be accounted, like Yeats, ‘one / With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson’ and recognized as the ‘True brother of a company / That sang to sweeten Ireland’s wrong, / Ballad and story, rann and song.’ But it was surely the very deep-seatedness of Wilde’s familiarity with nineteenth-century Irish patriotic poetry that made him less susceptible to it as a mode of expression. Yeats was converted to Irish themes by the sudden glamour and admirable literary intelligence of John O’Leary, but for Wilde these themes were always a given, if passed-over, element in his heritage. And, of course, he was every bit aware as Yeats ever was of the artistic inadequacies of the work done by the Nation poets, an awareness he veiled very graciously in San Francisco when it came to reading poems by Speranza herself:

Of the quality of Speranza’s poems I, perhaps, should not speak, for criticism is disarmed before love, but I am content to abide by the verdict of the nation, which has so welcomed her genius and understood the song – noticeably for its strength and simplicity – that ballad of my mother’s on ‘The Trial of The Brothers Sheares’ in ’98.

This ballad about the trial of two brothers Wilde then proceeded to read and, in the light of all we know today, it was a most significant choice. Yet even at the time of the San Francisco reading, in 1883, long before Wilde’s own trials, it must already have had a special personal meaning for him. It had been placed first, after all, in Lady Wilde’s first collection of poems when it appeared in 1864. Oscar was then ten years of age and would have been deeply susceptible to the dedication page of the volume which read, ‘Dedicated to my sons Willie and Oscar Wilde’; the page also carried the following quotation:

I made them indeed
Speak plain the word country. I taught them no doubt
That a country’s a thing men should die for at need.

In a book dedicated to them with such patriotic fervour, Oscar and Willie could hardly have failed to take to heart a poem actually called ‘The Brothers’, positioned so unignorably at the front of the collection. In it, the two protagonists are awaiting sentence for their part in the rebellion.

They are pale, but it is not fear that whitens
On each proud, high brow,
For the triumph of the martyr’s glory brightens
Around them even now …

IV

Before them, shrinking, cowering, scarcely human,
The base informer bends,
Who, Judas-like, could sell the blood of true men
While he clasped their hand as friends.

Clearly, it is not such a long poetic step from this story of the betrayal of noble youth by the handclasp of a friend to a realization that ‘each man kills the thing he loves’ [in The Ballad of Reading Gaol]; nor is it possible to ignore the correspondence between this fictional court with its sentenced brother and informer witness – between this and the actual court where the testimony of rent boys would be crucial in securing the conviction of one of the brothers to whom Speranza’s ballad was so pointedly addressed. I am suggesting, in other words, that Oscar’s bearing, years later, in the ‘black dock’s dreadful pen’ may well have been affected by the noble demeanour of the character in his mother’s poem.

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The Cast of Transparent Post Golden Globes

Posted on January 12, 2015 by sheila

The first question comes, and Jeffrey Tambor passes it right to Alex. And look what happens. The fact that he would pass it to her, and give her that space (“tell them what you just told me”) says worlds, says everything, about who he is. Here, dear, here is a platform, let them see you and hear you. He is a star, he is the star of the show, he just won an individual Golden Globe, but in that moment, he passed the mike (so to speak) to Alex. Because what he is engaged in, ultimately, is telling her story, or, at least, the story of the transgender community. He could easily have spoken about his own feelings, and his own “I feel really good about what we’re doing” thoughts: instead, he handed over the platform, he conceded space, he moved back. It’s made me cry. Alex moves gracefully and beautifully into that space. That space is HERS. It’s a long way from the suicidal 16 year old staring at the television. But here she is now.

Major. It’s major.

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Golden Globes: Congratulations to Jeffrey Tambor and Transparent!

Posted on January 12, 2015 by sheila

Transparent

The mania of celebration on my Facebook feed can’t even be expressed. Seeing Alex up on that stage, looking beautiful, and centered, and emotional … as well as the mere fact of this beautiful show, what it signifies (let alone her participation in it, which has been thrilling for those of us who love her) … and then there’s Tambor, and a lot of my friends know him, a lot of my friends took his acting class (still do). My brother is one of them. Tambor is, by all accounts, a phenomenal acting teacher, a truth-teller, honest as hell, he does so much good for his students. So my Facebook feed then filled up with one word from those people who know him: “TAMBOR.” Like a triumphant war-cry.

Sometimes great things happen to great people. Sometimes life happens that way. And it’s beautiful to take a breath, a pause, and acknowledge it.

It was a gorgeous moment and I could not be more proud of my dear friend. Well-deserved.

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The Congress (2014); directed by Ari Folman

Posted on January 11, 2015 by sheila

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The Congress, directed by Ari Folman, and starring Robin Wright as a sci-fi version of herself, knocked the wind out of me. It set off a series of echoing reverberations in my mind that are still going on, days after I first saw it. If I had seen The Congress in time, I would have included it in my Favorite Films of 2014 list. I had missed it on its original release, for no real reason. My friend Dan Callahan, whose opinion I trust, wrote some words on it on Facebook, speaking of how moving he found it, of how emotional the experience was. Here is some of what he wrote:

The negative reviews complained that the second, mainly animated half was “muddled.” Where they see muddle, I see an expansive richness of ideas. There is nothing obvious here. It’s a film about life and death, no less. I was unprepared for how emotional it is, particularly the scene where Wright’s agent, played by Harvey Keitel, talks her through the process of getting scanned for later use by movie studios. It really killed me, as did the ending. And Wright is magnificent, so game and so touchingly stoic. Made in 2013, released in 2014, it caused barely a ripple. But I think this might be a movie for all time.

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I saw no “muddle” either. I saw a film that had the courage of its convictions, that was really about something, and was willing to follow that “something” wherever it led, however extraordinary, however strange. When Robin Wright becomes her animated 2-D self, at first it felt like a tangent, or a trick or gimmick, and that we needed to “get back” to the “real thing” of the opening sequences. But that was part of the message of the movie: The animation is no tangent. That animated world WAS the world, at least the only part of it that mattered. And it was suggestive of disorientation and fantasy and escape and loss: Ultimately, there was nothing to “get back to.”

Despite the many layers and depths and convolutions of the plot, the thrust of the story, its themes and concerns, was always in the foreground, prioritized, underlined, from first shot to last. The Congress requires submission, that’s for sure: Folman’s is a very strong vision, operating with its own rules and its own architecture (sometimes obvious, sometimes submerged, but still there), and its rules make demands on the audience. It is a challenging piece of work, sometimes alienating, other times emotional with a raw-ness that caught my breath in my throat.

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It’s been a very strong year for women in movies (don’t let the awards-season gripings throw you off the scent). Like The Clouds of Sils Maria, another of my favorite movies last year, The Congress looks at the position of women in show business, especially women past the first bloom of youth. Forget the 80-year-old biddies: there will always be work for them (basically because they are the last ones standing in their peer group). It’s those in the middle of life, the late 30s and 40s and early 50s … the blackout period for most actresses … these are the women that nobody wants to deal with, that nobody wants to even see. There is a creep of invisibility around them, an enforced invisibility, a cultural diminishment. Part of that diminishment is the natural process of life and aging: You lose the glamour and ease of youth, but you gain in wisdom and power. And yet in a culture that worships youth, a woman developing crow’s feet or gaining a couple of pounds is destabilizing to our fantasies of what life should be like, what women should be like, what aging should look like. What is natural (aging) is seen as a betrayal. It is also a reminder that we all have to go at one point or another, and who wants to be reminded of that? Women’s bodies have always been on the frontiers of that argument since women’s bodies’ main job is to inspire lust and desire. Once that stops, the culture has no more use for them.

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That’s what The Congress is about, and yet it’s told in such an innovative and, frankly, bizarre way, that it actually opens up new avenues of thought about these tired old topics. It seems to provide something new to the conversation. And on an even deeper level than that, The Congress is about the movies themselves, what they provide, and how we take them for granted. It imagines a world where the movies, as we know them, no longer exist. The experience of storytelling has been fractured, spread-out, moving images floating by on the sides of Zeppelins, no different from an advertisement or a billboard. And in disconnecting the movies from a real-life audience, and in disconnecting the world of Story from anything grounded in reality, the human race itself loses its way. We (as in humans) first knew who “we” were when we painted woolly mammoths or whatever on the walls of caves, as a way to commemorate, share, TELL. The impulse was, “Here is what I saw. Here is what it was like for me. Maybe you’ll get something out of it, too.” The removal of that impulse removes the humanity from the human race.

I mean, honestly, that’s what The Congress is about. Heavy, right? Yes. It is extremely heavy. It’s an earned heaviness, completely un-didactic in its execution, a strange and phantasmagorical imagined world, gripping visually and often quite funny, that erupts all kinds of chaos in the mind of at least this viewer. Perhaps that is why it is seen as “muddled.” But the world presented is so fantastical, on purpose, our lives as humans so completely altered, our third dimension removed so that we operate completely in 2D flatness, where everything is possible, there are no more limitations on us, that there is no way back, no way out. The path behind us has been covered over. For good.

In The Congress, Robin Wright plays herself. She is an actress in her 40s. She can’t find work. Her agent (Harvey Keitel) is starting to get frustrated with her, and trying to get her to take responsibility for her own “poor choices” over the course of her career. She had it all, she had Hollywood begging for more, she was “the princess bride”, for God’s sake, and then what happened? She turned down more roles than she accepted, she had consuming relationships with men that took her eye off the ball, she took time off to raise her kids … I mean, what the HELL, Robin, how am I supposed to do anything with that? He’s hard on her, but it’s only because her career looks to him like a giant missed opportunity.

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She has tense meetings with the head of Miramount Studios (a gloriously condescending and sleazy Danny Huston). As she goes into the meeting, she is drawn to the posters of her old movies lining the walls, a testament to her career, but more a reminder of how once she was young, and now she is not. There is a poster of The Princess Bride, and Robin Wright stares at her younger self, for a long long time. The bottom falls out of the movie. And this is in the first 10 minutes.

There are clues that although this is Robin Wright playing someone called “Robin Wright” the world depicted is … not quite our world. There’s been some kind of “war” that has altered our lives completely. She lives in an abandoned hangar in the middle of a desert with her two kids. Beyond a fence out back is an airfield, enormous jets parked in the sand. Soldiers with guns appear from out of nowhere if that fence (and the air above it) is breached in any way. Her son, who is slowly going deaf, is treated by a kindly doctor (Paul Giamatti), a friend of Robin’s. Robin’s son flies kites in the blasting wind, and there are colored flags hung up everywhere in the surrounding desert, billowing and whipping in the wind. It’s recognizably a place on earth, but it looks strange, different. The old world is dying. Robin Wright, at 46 years old, is on the cusp. Her old self is dying, and Hollywood has no interest in her anymore.

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In The Congress, we learn that there has been developed a new technology where an actor is “scanned,” all of her genetic material and emotional apparatus captured, so that she – as her younger more preferable self- can continue to make movies, albeit she will be completely computer-generated. But Miramount offers Robin Wright a lucrative contract, an offer she feels she cannot refuse, especially with a sick son and the war. Sign away her Self, and go into forced retirement (accept invisibility, in other words.) Her computer-generated Self will still be on the movie screens of the land, and her Name will live forever.

The “scanning” scene, where Robin Wright, in a white leotard, steps into a gigantic dome, surrounded by technicians, is extraordinary. She is asked to laugh, to show thoughtfulness, to “go blank,” to go through all of these emotions so that the computers can accurately pick up what her face does, who she is in those moments. She freezes up, though. Nothing comes naturally. It is such an artificial environment, and there is also the sadness that she – the living breathing human actress – is no longer needed. They are in the process of stealing her essence, her pulsing humanity, in order to replicate it. But she signed the contract. Her time in the dome, then, becomes just another acting job.

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But how to “get it up” when you are not in the mood at all? How to laugh with vivacious joy when you feel no joy whatsoever? It seems impossible.

Well, that is the magic of acting, isn’t it? That is the craft and talent required to appear alive and in the moment onscreen. The Congress suggests, in its subversive way, that what actors bring to the role cannot be measured, and it is a pearl beyond price. And when we move away from stories with living breathing humans, we move away from what is human in us. There is an irony in all of this, of course, because the second half of the film is entirely animated. But the real heavy lifting has been done in the opening sequences, particularly the scene in the dome.

As Robin Wright freezes up, as she is unable to muster a joyful laugh in that circumstance, Harvey Keitel, her agent and friend, up in the booth, takes over, thinking he can help. And help he does. He speaks to her intimately and kindly, telling her a story from his own life, of how he got into show business. Harvey Keitel works a lot. He’s in a lot of bad movies, he’s in some good movies. Here, in this scene, is a reminder of what makes him him, of what makes him such a special character actor. Character actors play “support staff” (I wrote about that explicitly in my piece on Edward Herrmann), and character actors are there to prop up/reinforce/help the stars do what they need to do. Without a good surrounding cast of character actors, the stars often are not able to shine as brightly as they should. The scene with Harvey Keitel talking Robin Wright into a state of openness and freedom could be seen as a metaphor for the job of the character actor. The one who keeps the cool head, who creates the environment in which the star can operate.

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It is also a gorgeous example of the acting process and how it works, Harvey Keitel as acting coach. There is a lot of confusion about acting, and a lot of misunderstanding about what it actually IS. It’s frustrating to see, especially in people who spend the majority of their time writing about movies. I’ve always been actor-focused. It was my first “way in” to the movies, and it remains so. And so what I see in this extraordinary scene is a vibrant metaphor for how actors find their way into the truth of the fictional moment. It is mysterious, and one size will not fit all. In this particular instance, Harvey Keitel’s humorously told story about growing up in the Bronx and finding his way into show business, is so intimate and so compelling that Robin Wright relaxes completely into a state of listening. Listening is openness and accessibility: if you are listening then everything is possible. Her laughter, when it comes, is beautifully free and unselfconscious, her moments of deep thought as she considers the ramifications of the story, her “Yes” response to what he suggests … THAT’S acting. I’ve racked my brains for a clearer example of the acting process, and while there are a few that come to mind (Naomi Watts’ audition in Mulholland Drive, the entirety of Opening Night, Bette Davis’ bad vain audition in The Star, Maggie Cheung re-creating Ruan Ling Yu’s naturalistic process in Center Stage, much of the television series Slings and Arrows, a couple more, seriously there aren’t many) this dome scene is one of the clearest I’ve seen. That’s it, I thought, that’s how that magical transference occurs, from nothing-ness to activation, from fear to expression, where the blend occurs, where the real moment becomes the fictional moment, and there is no more border to cross, no frontier to break through. It’s all the same thing.

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Once she has been scanned, it is time for Robin Wright – the human – to vanish. Her services are no longer needed.

The next time we see her it is 20 years later, and she, the real woman, has been invited by Miramount Studios to a Futurist Congress that takes place in a “restricted animated zone.” You are given a vial of pink liquid, you sniff it up your nose, and voila, you are a cartoon version of your self, perambulating through the Congress of animated wonder. It is a celebration, it is a back-patting Yay For What We Have Created meeting, it is a symposium of the awesomeness of technology that allows us to morph, blend, be whatever we want to be. The elderly cartoon Robin Wright strolls through the Congress, overwhelmed by what she sees, and the animation is so hilarious, so all-encompassing, that it is like watching a history of animation unfurling all in one spot. It’s like the sketchbooks of R. Crumb and Chuck Jones and Walt Disney came to life and are all hanging out in the same restaurant. The faces are diverse, there are parodies, and recognizable figures, futuristic robots and femme-bots, there are non-famous figures, floozies and fat guys and every other body type under the sun, realistic and fantastic. There goes Elvis, for example (I kept my eye out for him from the get-go. I knew he would show up!)

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Robin Wright is there as a guest. But it is expected that she will not ruin the party by insisting that she is the real Robin Wright, that that little frail elderly woman has anything to do with the gorgeous “Robin Wright” projected out into the air in her various movie franchises, where she remains intimidatingly gorgeous and young. We see clips from some of those movies. They are fantastic, including an awesome homage to Dr. Strangelove.

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We see clips of the “fake” Robin Wright on the red carpet, babbling about why she did such-and-such a movie, her comments inane and ingratiating, and the “real” Robin Wright (who is actually a cartoon) stares at her “self”, baffled: It looks just like her, but look at what they have done to her, look at what they have made her into.

The whole thing is insanely innovative, tremendously disturbing, and keeps looping back on itself, repetitively, obsessively, each time deepening the confusion. What the hell is real? Is there a real Robin Wright, out there in the world? Or do those questions even matter anymore? If everyone on the planet has accepted that becoming a constantly fluctuating animated creature IS reality, then wondering how to ‘get back’ to the Actual becomes almost an intellectual argument, a theory only.

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She runs into an unshaven hottie with sad eyes during her time at the Congress (voiced by Jon Hamm), and it turns out that back in the “real world”, he was an animator, and his only job for 20 years was animating Robin Wright. He knows “her” intimately, his entire life has been devoted to her, he is in love with her, as an artist is in love with his muse. He understands the animated world and how it operates better than she does, so he acts as a tour guide. He is a breath of human-ness in all that nonsensical fantasy-world of escape, and the two pair up. But throughout you are reminded that what you are seeing is in constant flux, that perhaps he is not real, she is not real, nothing is real.

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At certain points during all of this, I found myself becoming restless, uneasy, wanting the movie to “get back” to what it was doing in the beginning. It was a process for me, settling down into what the movie wanted to do, as opposed to what I wanted it to do. As Robin Wright’s time at the Congress goes on and on, as the world becomes more and more fluctuating and unstable, as violence erupts, as reminders of her set place in that world come up at every turn, I relaxed into it. I let go and submitted to the story. Every story requires submitting to it to some degree, and often I don’t mention the inner process of submission because it’s not a struggle a lot of the time. A story starts, it’s well-told, I fly out of myself and into it, two hours later I return to my life and that’s the end.

But here I was noticing my own reactions throughout. I was asking myself questions, obsessively. “Why are you restless? Why do you want to fast-forward? What is going on here that you might not want to face?” That’s how strong Folman’s vision is. I could tell, I could sense, that this movie wanted something from me, and I resisted. Hard.

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Often that feeling you get that a movie wants something from you means that it is trying to manipulate you, through schmaltz or cheese-ball music or playing on your heartstrings. In those cases, I think it is right to resist. No, movie. You will not make me cry, you manipulative piece of garbage, I see what you’re up to, I see those puppet strings, you lazy movie! I resist! It is a moral obligation!

But here, I sensed that my resistance was about something else. Once I submitted (and it happened about 20 minutes into the animated part of the film), all kinds of fascinating stuff started going on. The movie was challenging and difficult, confusing and maddening, it made me tremendously sad, it frightened me to death, it enacted a sense of empathy and caring so huge that it shocked my normally cranky attitude, it also – on a more distant level – filled me with admiration for Folman and his vision, and also made me fall in love with Robin Wright for submitting herself to this story and its very brutal brand of truth.

When the ending came, I was left flattened as a pancake. I couldn’t breathe. I was devastated. There had been a release of emotion, but without the comfort of catharsis.

Granted, I only saw it last week, and the effects of it have not worn off, and so I will revisit it dutifully once the dust has cleared, but from where I am standing right now, in the immediate aftermath, The Congress feels tremendous.

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Elvis On Ice

Posted on January 10, 2015 by sheila

The Mississippi RiverKings hockey team originated in Memphis and every year they have an “Elvis Presley Night,” commemorated with different team jerseys.

Last year, the jersey paid tribute to Elvis’ 1973 televised special from Hawaii Aloha from Hawaii.

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And this year?

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I love these people.

My friend Tommy tagged me on Facebook with that last beautiful surreal image and it literally made my week.

Posted in Miscellania | Tagged , | 1 Comment

The Books: The Redress of Poetry; ‘Orpheus in Ireland: On Brian Merriman’s “The Midnight Court”,’ by Seamus Heaney

Posted on January 10, 2015 by sheila

On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)

NEXT BOOK: Seamus Heaney’s The Redress of Poetry.

Brian Merriman lived and worked in County Clare in the mid-to-late 1700s. Apparently he was a Math teacher. Not much else is known about him, except for his huge poem in Irish about the battle of the sexes in Ireland, called “The Midnight Court” (or Cúirt an Mheán Oíche). It’s an epic poem, a gigantic narrative, involving a poet who falls asleep in a field and then is dragged into a “Midnight Court,” run entirely by women, presided over by a female judge, who all find Irish men to be entirely lacking in sexual potency. As a matter of fact, Irish women are dying on the vine while you Irish boys bumble about and refuse to SATISFY the sexual needs of the women around you. And we hold you in contempt. Defend yourself! Defend yourself! It also lampooned the celibacy of priests. Pretty serious target practice there. Although the topic is a serious one (especially for the horny women begging to get laid), the tone of it is a rollick. Some of the translations (Heaney’s included) have them cursing in a very modern way. The judge declares at one point, “Fuck it!” It’s great.

I read the poem a long time ago, and thought it was hilarious, but didn’t think much more about it. I didn’t study it in a university setting or anything like that – which is probably a good thing. You could post-modern analyze the thing until all of the humor and sexiness is judged/damned/dismissed. What I do remember about it (and granted I was much younger when I read it) is that it was not just the fact that Irish people needed to procreate more, that these were sexually viable women who wanted to have babies and why couldn’t the men around them get it up for them? It wasn’t just about having babies. Sex was about pleasure and the Irish women in the poem were DYING for it. It’s still kind of radical, and the poem has come under attack from the humorless for being sexist or reductive or whatever critical word is in vogue at the moment. As though sexual pleasure for women is not one of the most important topics in the world, or as though because Brian Merriman was a man he can have nothing of use to say about women. Harrumph. As though things like easy birth control has not taken reproduction out of the cards, so that women can now “get theirs” without the fear of being bogged down by pregnancies – and we STILL have controversies surrounding that – we can see it now in some of these health care debates, with certain companies not wanting to cover birth control. Or you have to give a reason why you want birth control, as though “I would like to have sex without the possibility of pregnancy” ISN’T a valid answer. It’s barbaric. Female sexual pleasure, separate from procreation, is still seen as so threatening that it must be managed and corralled. There is still a lot of work to be done. Still, Merriman’s poem is angry, frank and funny. Yes, it’s heteronormative. It was written in the late 1700s. I’m not sure what else you want from the man.

It’s been a long long time since I read “The Midnight Court,” but Heaney’s lecture brings it all back.

You can check out “The Midnight Court” here, which is a pretty good website, and has the Irish text placed alongside the English text. I am sure there is much that is lost in translation, and that’s one of the things that Heaney addresses in his lecture, the issue of translation and the challenges that brings.

Translation from the Irish, a native language, into English, the language of the conqueror, is challenging on all sorts of levels, political, cultural, and – as Heaney points out below – gender-wise as well. The poem is a battle cry of women to get satisfaction, to be loved and touched and pleased as is their due. There have been some translations that have turned the language a very phallocentric (which I can’t discuss, since I don’t speak Irish, but Heaney talks about it): and so some of the more feminine subtleties of the original Irish version have been lost. An erasure of a certain kind of voice, there in the original. These are all extremely Irish concerns, but they affect us all. One of Heaney’s gifts is pointing it all out.

All in all, a fascinating topic. Heaney sees Merriman’s poem as a kind of re-imagining of Orpheus from out of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where the poet is torn apart by a bunch of maenads, basically punishing him for going gay. How dare you deny us your cock, in other words. Good thing I’m not a scholar.

Here’s an excerpt from Heaney’s Oxford lecture about Brian Merriman’s “Midnight Court”. He references the wonderful Irish-language poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill in the lecture, and I went to one of her poetry readings at The Ireland House here in New York City. She’s absolutely wonderful live, and although it was years ago, I still remember some of what she said word for word. She can’t write in English. The poetry just doesn’t come for her in English. It’s a foreign language to her, and she does not consider herself poetically fluent in it. She also spoke extensively about translation, and getting a good translator for your work, who will not take the “you” right out of it. Her work does get translated into English, from time to time, but not everything gets translated, and so she has paid a price (in prestige, wider recognition) because of that. She is willing to pay that price. She is an Irish-language poet and that’s all there is to it.

Tangent! But I highly recommend checking out the poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Hearing her read it in Irish was a supreme pleasure, but the translations that are out there of her volumes of poetry are good enough to get the feel of what she is up to. (I recommend The Water Horse, in particular. I wrote about the book here, and you can see one of her poems there, both in Irish and in English translation.)

Onward, to Heaney’s discussion of Brian Merriman, reactions to his poem through the years, as well as the problem of translation.

Excerpt from The Redress of Poetry, ‘Orpheus in Ireland: On Brian Merriman’s “The Midnight Court”,’ by Seamus Heaney

If, therefore, we are prepared to make an artificial distinction between the poem’s socio-political quotient and its artistic quotient, we could argue that during the first half of the century and more, Cúirt an Mheán Oíche was important because it sponsored a libertarian and adversarial stance against the repressive conditions which prevailed during those years in Irish life, public and private. And we could further argue that in more recent times its importance has shifted: from being an ally in the war against sexual repression and a censorship obsessed with sexual morality, the poem has become a paradigm of the war initiated by the women’s movement for women’s empowerment, their restoration to the centre of language and consciousness and thereby also to the centre of all the institutions and functioning’s of society.

This shifting and salubrious relationship between the poem and its world can be illustrated by looking very briefly at its reception and interoperation at three different moments over the last hundred years. Seventy years ago, for example, when the Irish critic and cultural nationalist Daniel Corkery gave his account of it in The Hidden Ireland, he was fairly eager to play down Merriman’s send-up of clerical celibacy and his advocacy of unconstrained heterosexual activity between consenting adults. Rather than saluting these extravagances as fantastic possibilities to be savored in a spirit of hilarity and transgression, Corkery spoke with a certain primness of the poem’s treatment of “curious questions” and attributed the pagan force of the thing to its ideas as such. It was as if he were anxious not to find the poet guilty of some form of un-Irish activity. Corkery inclined therefore to blame what he called the poem’s “irreligious ideas” on foreign influences, and he favored the old academic notion that these ideas came from Voltaire and Rousseau, and that Merriman had picked them up through reading the books of these Enlightenment philosophes in the houses of the gentry he was supposed to have been so fond of visiting. Yet Corkery could not help recognizing that the poem’s subversiveness derives in large measure from a native strain of paganism surviving unregenerate at different levels in Irish popular culture. But he fudged the issue, presumably because it would have been an embarrassment for a propagandist of the new self-Gaelicizing Irish Free State to discover in the older Gaelic literature too gleeful an endorsement of anti-clerical attitudes and too robust a promulgation of the basic desirability of promiscuous sexual behavior.

Conditions have changed dramatically since Corkery’s book appeared in 1924. The literary and moral constraints have clearly eased when an Irish-language woman poet like Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill can publish in Ireland, with an Irish publisher and to Irish acclaim, a poem like “Féar Suaithinseach” which implies that it is the sanctified male priest who is in need of the healing ministrations of the sexual woman and not the other way around; or when in another poem called “Gan do Chuid Eadaigh,” she expresses what might be called naked delight in imagining in erotic detail the body of a lover stripped of his clothes.

But even if Merriman’s poem can be read nowadays as a precursor of these free treatments of sexuality, and be seen as one of a line of precursors that includes James Joyce’s Ulysses and, indeed, Frank O’Connor’s 1945 translation of The Midnight Court itself, it is still not immune to moralistic criticism of a more recent kind. The poem still stands in danger of being accused for different reasons under the terms of a new feminist consensus. For example, I discovered that the political activist Mairin de Burca described it some thirteen years ago as ‘sexist rubbish.” She did concede that men may mean well, but she nevertheless maintained that they “cannot write intelligently about women’s oppression.” This in itself sounds like a lot of sexist rubbish; and I would certainly argue that Brian Merriman should be immune to the common feminist castigation of Irish men poets for representing women (and Ireland) in the passive, submissive roles of maiden and mother. In fact, Merriman deserves a specially lenient hearing in the women’s court, if only for having envisaged his own prosecution ahead of time and for having provided the outline of a case against himself. He was surely something of a progressive when it came to the representation of women. He gave them bodies and brains and let them speak as if they lived by them. He revised and implicitly criticized the ailing genre by burlesquing its idealized, victimized maiden in the figure of the beam-limbed bailiff; and he gave to the other young flesh-and-blood speirbhean in the witness box a transfusion of emotional and rhetorical energy long denied to women by poets who had preceded him.

Still, the fact that the poem is now probably read more in English translations than in the original Irish has by no means lessened the impression of machismo which surrounds it in the mind of the general reader. Of these translations, Frank O’Connor’s is probably the best and the best known, and since its emphatic bawdiness was meant to challenge the censor as much as it was meant to delight the reader, O’Connor very deliberately upped the sexual ante in a distinctly male idiom. In an introduction to the first 1945 edition of this version, he admits that there are qualities in the Irish which his own English, for better or worse, had tended to coarsen:

As always, when he deals with women’s human needs, [Merriman] puts real tenderness and beauty into the writing. My English cannot give the delicacy and fragrance of a line like ag súil trím chola le cigar ó’m cheile. There is nothing remarkable about it … no extravagance of imagery or language which you can translate; it is a pure classical beauty of vowels and consonants which you either hear or do not hear.

This amounts to an admission by O’Connor that in his translation the surface noise of his own provocative anti-puritanical agenda is going to be more audible than the under-music of the women’s voices; which means that those aspects of the poem most likely to offend a contemporary feminist are highlighted rather than mitigated by his treatment of them in English. A sensitized reader nowadays, man or woman, is going to be more uneasy than O’Connor ever was about, for example, the picture of the young woman setting her cap so assiduously for a man, or about the normative status which the poem – in spite of its subversive intent – grants to the status of marriage. So even though from a feminist viewpoint there has to be something admirable about the way Aiobheall of Craglee regulates the world of the poem (like a woman president in charge of the court and the country, a kind of aisling promise of Mary Robinson); and though there is a redemptive realism in the young witness’s revelation that women can be every bit as sexually capable and cupidinous as men, it is nevertheless true that the poem places much emphasis on woman as a kind of human brooder and mostly ignores her potential as a being independent of her sexual attributes and her reproductive apparatus.

But all of this has to be understood in the context of the poem’s overall drive to celebrate the creaturely over the ethereal in human beings, male or female.

Posted in Books | Tagged , , , , , | 10 Comments

Marc Maron Interviews Paul Thomas Anderson

Posted on January 9, 2015 by sheila

Just in case you have a free hour…

Marc Maron’s interview of Paul Thomas Anderson for his podcast is FANTASTIC.

Right now my favorite part is Paul Thomas Anderson saying that watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies help him with sad days or dark moments and that those movies were the main inspiration for Punch Drunk Love. And that if he could go back in time, he would want to go back and work with Sterling Hayden. Heart-crack.

But the whole thing is great. Worth the time.

Posted in Directors | Tagged | 10 Comments

Review: Taken 3 (2015)

Posted on January 9, 2015 by sheila

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No. And I actually liked the first two. The poster’s tagline makes me want to say, “Do you PROMISE?”

My review of Taken 3 is now up at Rogerebert.com.

Posted in Movies | Tagged , | 30 Comments