Movie Enthusiast Issue 59: Madeline’s Madeline, The Wild Pear Tree, 20 Pioneering Women in Film
Watching
In the last month I’ve seen two of the best movies of 2018! Now I need to figure out how to convince you of the soundness of my judgment…
Madeline’s Madeline (2018)
This is not an easy movie to describe and even after sitting on it for over a week I’m still not sure how to talk about it. Let’s start with the synopsis provided by its distributor:
Madeline got the part! She’s going to play the lead in a theater piece! Except the lead wears sweatpants like Madeline’s. And has a cat like Madeline’s. And is holding a steaming hot iron next to her mother’s face – like Madeline is.
Madeline (newcomer Helena Howard) has become an integral part of a prestigious physical theater troupe. When the workshop's ambitious director (Molly Parker) pushes the teenager to weave her rich interior world and troubled history with her mother (Miranda July) into their collective art, the lines between performance and reality begin to blur. The resulting battle between imagination and appropriation rips out of the rehearsal space and through all three women’s lives.
Writer/director Josephine Decker has long been an independent filmmaker to admire, utilizing a welcome expressionistic approach that imbues her subjects with a vibrant sense of urgency. Anchored by a virtuoso performance from newcomer Helena Howard, whose powerful screen presence commands attention, Decker’s film displays a rare sensitivity for capturing the messy struggles of discovering a sense of one's self that defies easy narrative categorization.
Whatever image you conjured in your head after reading the above three paragraphs is not what this movie is. Instead, it is: a sinking feeling in your stomach as soon as you hear the sound design gurgling up from the black of the opening credits; the exhilaration of feeling your disdain turn to curiosity turn to excitement as the seeming lawlessness of Decker’s filmmaking begins to coalesce into its own obediently-followed internal logic of spontaneity; the realization after the fact that Miranda July’s performance, off-key in its earnestness at first blush, anchors Madeline’s subjective experience of the world—hyperchromatic and fueled by antidepressants, except when they run out—in an objective reality beyond her capacity to grasp on her own. I could also describe this movie as the older, less inhibited cousin of The Fits, another movie that’s as much about a young girl trying to define herself in a world that wants to define her as it is about rhythm and movement and embodiment. This is a rich movie and Helena Howard’s performance is…Helena Howard’s performance. It’s singular in the way that performances by actresses who are bringing all of themselves to a role and shaping the role and the movie around them are (maybe you could compare it to Gena Rowlands in something of Cassavetes’?).
The Wild Pear Tree (2018)
This is also a rich movie and it’s more straightforward both narratively and cinematically so it is easier to talk about! Sinan, a Turkish college graduate, returns home from the big city university where he had been studying. He’s from a more rural part of the country, where there’s less going on and where his family is a source of constant, usually petty frustration. He recently finished writing his first book and is trying to get funds to publish it. But who’s going to believe in a kid who, honestly, doesn’t really know anything about the world yet and who’s also kind of a narcissistic jerk? (I mean, who among us.)
Because this is a Nuri Bilge Ceylan movie, The Wild Pear Tree, like Madeline’s Madeline, can’t wholly be summed up just be recounting its plot. It’s the kind of movie that presents me with a dilemma: based on the plot synopsis alone, I would have a hard time recommending it to my friends, who are pretty much all worn out on the genre of “aspirationally intellectual male agonizes about his wretchedness without realizing there’s nothing special about it.” Yet the things that make this movie so much more than just that tired description would have you believe are things that you have to experience by letting go of yourself and giving in to the filmmaking. The Wild Pear Tree, in line with NBC’s other movies, is also three hours long, so that’s a big ask for most people. Once you’re in the theater though, if you’ve checked your expectations at the door, you’ll in for a treat.
The Wild Pear Tree is filled with camera movements, compositions, and unexpected edits that suffuse it protagonist’s life with much more beauty and grace than we would expect to find therein given his behavior. (Since we don’t get to see or hear his writing, we can’t know if his novel is a work of beauty and love or if it’s overwrought; or maybe we do; again, this movie is three hours long, so forgive me if I missed something critical when I ducked out for a bathroom break). Unlike the way Madeline’s Madeline is made in a “subjective” way (the movie seems to constructed as an approximation of Madeline’s subjective experience of the world, given her traumatic memories and mental illness; then the movie starts to complicate its own point of view, since the plot of the movie is about a theater director who uses Madeline’s subjective experience to construct a play about her subjective experience, leaving us to wonder whose perspective we’re following, exactly—Madeline’s, her in-story director’s, or Josephine Decker’s; or all three at once?), The Wild Pear Tree approximates Sinan’s subjectivity by shifting focus away from him and toward his external environment.
So, right, that doesn’t make any sense if you haven’t already seen the movie and you know what I’m talking about. So how do I communicate what I saw? How do I communicate how this scene:
…filled me with so much nostalgia and longing, not because of any words these two people exchanged in dialogue, but because of the way the filmmaking—the renewed emphasis on the soundtrack of wind and birds and rustling grass, the dappled light ebbing and flowing gently in and out of the leaves, the way the scene is edited to suddenly shift our perspective—put me so perfectly in mind of my own memories of walking through New England forests in autumn, alone with nature and my thoughts and God? And how do you describe the two and a half hours that follow this scene, the long slog of Dostoevskyan conversations and the impatience to return to the romantic beauty of that earlier scene in the forest? And how do you describe the relief by the film’s end that Sinan’s journey has turned out to be one where he matures out of his youthful arrogance, coming to learn that life’s most beautiful moments happen, you are grateful for them, and then rather than despair over their fleetingness or their absence, you make amends and face reality and put yourself to work where it’s needed? I guess you could just call it a lyrical tone poem or whatever critics these days say when they’re too lazy or too close to their deadline to write something that actually means anything; but what good what that do to inspire anyone to see it?
Full Moon in Paris (1984)
I had meant to watch Rebel Without a Cause this weekend but the DVD I got from the library was broken so I had to pivot to Rohmer.
Full Moon in Paris has the distinction among Rohmer movies of featuring a heroine with truly terrible taste. She lives in the suburbs with her long-time partner but moves to her apartment in Paris so she can live a more fulfilling nightlife (she’s a night owl, her hubby prefers to stay in). Over the course of the movie, she repaints and redecorates her pad. It goes from being a blank slate open to a world of possibility to…
…that. A putrid green clamshell of a space with plaster corinthian columns and weird neon light tubes dangling haphazardly all over the place. Also she wears all these equally hideous shades of green, blow dries her hair to enormous heights, has bad taste in men-to-have-affairs-with…yeesh.
Big Little Lies Episode 1 (2017)
This is not a movie but I think I need a palate cleanser after reliving that memory of the 80s.
Ah, Nicole Kidman in earth tones with reclaimed wood patio furniture on the California coast. That’s more like it!
Reading
Alice Guy Blaché helped invent cinema as we know it. The first female filmmaker and among the first to make a fiction film, she made her debut in 1896 with the one-minute “The Cabbage Fairy.” She shot this charmer — which shows a sprite smilingly plucking real babies from a cabbage patch — on a Paris patio while working as a secretary for Gaumont, which would soon be a film powerhouse. Historians ignored and even rejected that date perhaps, as the theorist Jane M. Gaines has suggested, it was unthinkable that a young female secretary supporting a widowed mother could be responsible for an early-cinema milestone.
Guy Blaché is thought to have made some 1,000 films (mostly shorts) that included cowboy flicks, cross-dressing comedies and melodramas; about 150 had synchronized sound (this was before the industry widely embraced sound). She founded a film company, Solax, and built a studio in Fort Lee, N.J., where she hung a banner for her actors that read, “Be Natural.” Her last film was released in 1920 and then she was forgotten until scholars began to realize that she had been there all along.
—20 women who made a mark on cinema history (including the screenwriter for The Empire Strikes Back and the director of the first Chinese-American film)
IT’S SO CRAZY HOW SELDOM WE’VE SEEN THE FILMS MADE BY A 70-YEAR-OLD WOMAN AUTEUR.
—Miriam Bale with a stupidly obvious and yet somehow astonishing observation
Coming Soon
Chris Marker made a 13-episode documentary about the enduring impact of ancient Greek art and culture on the world. The Owl’s Legacy returns for the first time in 30 years this November.
Today in news I don’t know how I feel about: Chloé Zhao, director of The Rider and Songs My Brother Taught Me, has been signed by Marvel to direct The Eternals. On the one hand, Zhao is a promising new director and I’m excited to see how she brings her particular interests and directing style to a superhero movie. On the other, I’d rather she get $100 million to do a project of her own choosing. I suppose this could be a stepping stone to letting her do what she wants later in her career!
Movie Enthusiast will be on break until after I return from New York Film Festival.