Quaranstreaming II
Featuring: Straight Up, Jonathan Demme, Wiseman’s Hospital, Liberté
Housekeeping
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Watching
Straight Up (2019)
The dandy, hyperactive, and chronically anxious Todd (writer/director/actor James Sweeney) had always just assumed he was gay, but his consistent dissatisfaction with dating men has led him to deduce that he might, in fact be straight, to the consternation of both his entertainment industry-adjacent friends and his therapist. Rory (Katie Findlay), a 1940s Hepburn-channeling transplant to L.A. wants to be an actress but is rapidly becoming disillusioned by how shallow and misogynistic everyone around her is. She and Todd meet each other at the library, where she reasonably mistakes him for a librarian, and, compelled by one another’s wits, love of Gilmore Girls, and baseline mutual respect for women and people of color, they become best friends. Gradually, the relationship takes on a romantic hue, and they start dating, but with a twist—they decide not to have sex!
If you hate how a certain subset of too-online liberal millennials on the internet talk, you will probably have more fun pouring boiling water into your ears than watching this movie. Straight Up is a seven-layer cake of ironic affectation, and it looks the part too, candy-colored and symmetrical with a baker’s precision. Sweeney takes a lot of broad satirical swipes at all sorts of SoCal subcultures, from the low-hanging fruit of young and beautiful social media celebrities to left-leaning Gen X-ers who aren’t, you know too left-of-center. (“I really liked your parents, but especially your mother, because she was at least 50% less racist than your father.”)
More so than most recent narrative cinema I can recall, Straight Up is unafraid to address that sexuality is often much more complicated than “you’re either this, or you’re that, and if for some reason you’re bisexual, it’s a 50-50 split and there’s no difference between how you feel for men vs. women.” Yet it doesn’t seem quite right to champion the movie as a paragon of “bisexual representation” or “asexual representation” given that Todd seems to be more sex-phobic than anything else. There’s a lot going on here, as we like to say, and for all of Sweeney’s confidence in taking on hegemonic cultural ideas about intimacy, sex, and relationships, in the end he still doesn’t know how to wrap up a story without them.
Stop Making Sense (1984)
Swing Shift (1984)
Married to the Mob (1988)
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Philadelphia (1993)
Rachel Getting Married (2008)
I had never seen a Jonathan Demme movie, so what does that mean, exactly? The six I watched over the course of a week in April are about as disparate as you can get, with genres and tones varying wildly and the Goldie Hawn cut of Swing Shift not even feeling like a Demme film at all. And there I go again, pinpointing his kind of filmmaking as somehow definably his.
Rachel Getting Married seems like an example of something Demme was known for: inclusive casting and compassionate filmmaking. I swear I’ve never seen a more pleasant dysfunctional family argument onscreen; being angry at one another is just a means of getting to a place of greater peace and reconciliation for these folks, rather than an end in itself. I’m bewildered that anyone involved in this movie thought it was necessary to make the wedding party as absurdly multicultural as it is. At times the movie recalls childhood memories of walking through the piñata section of the party store at the local mall—now whose idea was it to put that there?
It feels like I, personally, should have more to say about Philadelphia than I really do. It’s interesting that I’m only just watching it now, after, among other movies on the subject, the much less mainstream Buddies. That film, which came out in 1985, is also a humanizing picture of a gay man with AIDS, but told entirely from a queer point of view. Sure it’s nice that Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington got together to preach against the bigotry of homophobia (and for Hanks to explain opera to us; seriously why is that scene so long), but what you won’t get from Philadelphia’s good intentions is the reality of how much activism was required on the part of the gay community for anyone to care, let alone make this movie.
I am not much of a concertgoer, and I was always curious to find out what it was about Stop Making Sense that had so many people falling all over themselves in adoration. It’s just a concert film, right? Is the concert good, or is the movie good? Well now I know! It’s all David Byrne’s fault. Seriously how do you even discover that your body is capable of moving that way? Everyone in Married to the Mob was channeling a strange, madcap energy that for some reason reminded me of the late 80s/early 90s cartoon movies (Duck Tales, anyone?) that I grew up watching instead of Married to the Mob. I think they were maybe all drinking from the same water source.
Silence of the Lambs speaks for itself.
Hospital (1970)
It felt appropriate to watch Frederick Wiseman’s movie about Metropolitan Hospital in New York City, one of his shorter ones (84 minutes). I was struck by how often people in this movie explain to patients that they need to get better so they can “get back to work” or “get back on their feet and get a job” or something to that effect. We see plenty of evidence that the doctors and nurses here care about their patients as people worth more than just the labor they provide to society, but it is unnerving how often (and perhaps unwittingly?) the outcome of good health is framed in terms of its benefit to—or necessity for—capitalist society.
Wiseman’s knack for finding interesting characters doesn’t disappoint. There’s a man who’s been wheeled into the ER moaning and writhing and begging not to die after a bad trip on mescaline. This sequence is the longest in the film, and Wiseman proves his mastery of the delayed punchline by making sure to include the shot of a nurse ominously, and therefore comically, depositing a bedpan by his side at the start.
Liberté (2019)
Juste avant la Révolution française, a bunch of aristocrats sneak out to the woods on the border for a night of kinky shenanigans. This movie is two hours and ten minutes long, immaculately framed, dimly lit, occasionally disgusting, and mind-numbingly boring. It’s a supremely easy movie to dunk on, but it clearly wasn’t made for that purpose. So what is director Albert Serra going for?
The ever-perceptive Michael Sicinski writes persuasively that the movie is not trying to shock us. Everything is filmed so matter-of-factly, after all, and individual scenes of lurid and/or violent behavior last long enough that our senses gradually get used to whatever is startling about the acts in question. Nothing shocks like in Silence of the Lambs because nothing is filmed to shock. What’s important here is that perverse behavior for these people, at this time, is thrilling in a way that isn’t immediately obvious to a viewer today. It isn’t just a matter of exposure (we have the internet, 18th century French aristocrats did not—but, like, come on, they still had Sade). It’s rather that the operative paradigms for understanding sexuality, nature, and morality were themselves different. The movie’s sparse on dialogue overall, but its most infamous line—“Open the gates of hell!” uttered by a woman just before [redacted]—gets the point across. There’s a metaphysical dimension to their transgressions, at least in their imaginations. Any particular acts these people commit are secondary in pleasure to the idea of violating religious, civil, moral boundaries. Or so the argument goes.
The title gestures at freedom but, as Sicinski notes, it’s ironic. They’re only free do do what they want on the condition that no one see it, and they must be done by dawn (the film starts at dusk and ends promptly at sunrise). The concept of freedom, at least as Sicinski is using it, is only intelligible in the context of coexistent oppression and sublimation. There are good reasons to submit one’s desires for bodily pleasure to regulation (pursuit of higher goods, service to others, hope for growth in one’s capacity to love their neighbor), and bad ones (fear of punishment from sky daddy, the state doesn’t give you a choice). “Ah, and by ‘freeing’ themselves from the shackles of bourgeois morality they are merely enslaving themselves to baser passions!” Yes, duh, but try telling that to all the critics who are praising Serra’s film as radical for its unflinching depiction of bodily autonomy and fleshy abundance. Unless your sex is redistributing wealth, let’s try finding some other word for it.
Reading
Since the Cannes Film Festival will not be taking place this year, Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott asked directors for their fondest Cannes memories. Abel Ferrara’s is hard to beat:
The night of the premiere [of “Body Snatchers"] I was all set and in perfect time for the five-minute walk from the hotel to the Palais, when I went to put the tie on. Only there was no tie. I freaked. My wife at the time was skeptical about any tie, but the PR people were begging me to just button my shirt: “You are the director, you don’t need a tie.” But as all good addicts, I had a brilliant idea. I called room service and told [the waiter] I needed his clip-on bow tie and would give him 50 American dollars for it. He refused, but [after] another 50 in French money, I got the use of the tie till midnight. We made it to the red carpet exactly five minutes late, which to the people in charge was the equivalent of strangling de Gaulle in mid-salute.
Now once upon another time we were back with “The Blackout.” It wasn’t in competition, but because it had Dennis Hopper and Béatrice Dalle and Claudia Schiffer were also in it, we were going to have a special out-of-competition screening. I was there in plenty of time, sharp and tieless and awaiting our actors. I hear our PR person [with two cellphones] repeating, “OK, Béatrice is still in the bathroom, OK, she is refusing to come out,” then from the other phone, “Claudia has finally put her shoes on, she just took them off.” Forty-five minutes later, Béatrice and Claudia arrived. No one ever said a word to Béatrice or Claudia, strutting down that carpet with all the lights in the world flashing.
Coming Soon, etc.
I have no idea how anyone can plan new filmmaking projects right now, and yet—
Sofia Coppola is developing a miniseries of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, which has never before been adapted for the screen.
Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt, together, for Netflix! In Ball and Chain, adapted from Scott Lobdell’s comic about a superhero couple in a strained marriage whose powers won’t work when they’re apart.
Although Cannes is cancelled, in early June the Festival will announce the films that would have been part of its selection. Subsequently the Festival will try to help these films find an audience this fall into next spring.
Roger Deakins has started a podcast! I haven’t listened yet, so I’m putting this here as much as a reminder to myself as a PSA for you.
Right before this newsletter went to press, I learned that French actor Michel Piccoli, whose career spanned 8 decades and 230 movies, has passed away at 94. Join me in honoring him by watching all 4 hours of La Belle Noiseuse (now streaming on Criterion Channel and Kanopy!) this weekend. Or, just, rewatch The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.
Studio Ghibli has refashioned some stills from their movies into Zoom backgrounds for all of your teleconferencing needs. (Check back frequently because in the 12 hours between when I initially wrote this and when I tested all the links, they had added a new batch!)