Quaranstreaming III
Featuring: Da 5 Bloods, Gaslight, But I’m a Cheerleader, and more
Watching
Fourteen (2019)
We have so many movies about young people trying to make it in New York. Why not some movies about, I don’t know, young aspiring writers in Minneapolis or young community organizers in Durham? In Fourteen at least the young people are more of the do-good sort than the independent art scene type. Mara (Tallie Medel), who works in early childhood education, has known Jo (Norma Kuhling), a social worker, since they were fourteen. The movie charts close to a decade of their relationship as they advance through jobs, partners, and mental health crises.
Director Dan Sallitt, a fixture of “The Filmmakers Would Like to Thank” segments of indie movie credits, cuts the story lean. He moves through the years quickly and without warning; you don’t lose your breath, exactly, because you are sitting on your couch watching a movie, but you’re left with a phantom windedness as you try to place how much time has elapsed between Mara and Jo’s last run-in. Jo relies too much on Mara to rescue her from bad choices and bad luck. Out of duty or beneficence but not without exasperation, Mara shows up for Jo at every new low the latter hits. Years of this does not make for a pleasant friendship, though Sallitt still wrings a watchable movie out of it.
When Mara decides to start letting go, we feel the effects immediately. The day- and week-long intervals between scenes in the first half of the movie become month- and year-long gaps. After some long and unspecified period of absence, Mara runs into Jo by pure coincidence in Washington Square Park. They trade obligatory promises to reach out and catch up over dinner. The next time Mara sees Jo is at Jo’s funeral.
Most of the cast play their parts with an air of mild detachment (or are they just stoned?), which makes Kuhling’s performance all the more noticeable. She emotes undisguisedly, making Jo both a point of interest (who is this girl, why is she different from the others?) and a caution sign (why do I sense that nothing good is going to happen to this person?). While Kuhling gets to play scenes like dramatically sipping tea under a spotlight after pulling a knife on her boyfriend, Medel by contrast has to do the less exciting work of groggily leaving the bed to answer 2:00 a.m. text message emergencies. Understated and gradual exhaustion may be a less compelling character trait than unmedicated mania, but the long-suffering friend archetype delivers the bigger emotional blow in the end when the performance is as good as Medel’s is.
La Belle Noiseuse (1991)
I have not seen The Trip to Greece, or any of the other Trip movies. If I want to take a European vacation at the movies, I will do so on my own terms, which are pretty similar to the terms Jacques Rivette sets for his four-hour film about a young woman (Emmanuelle Béart) who agrees to sit for a famous painter (Michel Piccoli) to reinvigorate him into trying to finish his long-abandoned masterwork, the Beautiful Troublemaker of the film’s title. The story is loosely adapted from Balzac and the music is courtesy of Stravinsky. The artist lives in a castle and is married to Jane Birkin, the first woman to sit for his abandoned chez-d’œuvre. When we’re not in the artist’s studio, we’re having breakfast in his kitchen with the great bay windows open to the garden, we’re enjoying an after-dinner drink with a mildly sweet cake on the balcony at night, we’re lounging in a hotel courtyard with afternoon coffee to accompany the music of early summer cicadas. What else could you possibly want out of a European jaunt?
The movie is so long because it is full of unedited close-up shots of the painter at work. (To clarify: the hands doing the drawing and painting in these shots belong to Bernard Dufour; Piccoli is almost never shown identifiably making a brushstroke that actually leaves ink.) It’s mesmerizing not just to watch him go but to listen to the sounds his pencils and brushes make on canvas. The movie wouldn’t be out of place playing on PBS on a Saturday afternoon, if it weren’t for the woman sitting on the floor naked for two and a half hours.
But I’m a Cheerleader (1999)
They never told me about But I’m a Cheerleader, and no, I’m not exactly sure who the “they” I’m referring to are supposed to be. A friend did mention it in passing last year, one of the fondly-remembered indie films that kept her going through high school and college before she would move to a bigger city. The movie’s short and sweet, and in contrast to received wisdom that says there are no good movies where women in love get a happy ending, Clea DuVall and Natasha Lyonne get just that.
There are all sorts of goofily amusing casting choices. Michelle Williams (the white one) is here for all of 90 seconds as the best friend joining the parents to help stage an intervention for Lyonne, whose character is blissfully unaware that she’s a lesbian (the Melissa Etheridge poster in her room is supposed to be a tip-off). For some reason it is decided that the reasonable thing to do when your daughter doesn’t know that she’s a lesbian is to first make her aware of it, and then invite RuPaul over to take her away to a conversion therapy program, of which he plays the star graduate-turned-instructor. When some of the kids in the program sneak off to a gay bar with the help of a gay couple who have apparently decided to set up a homestead a couple of miles down the road so they can assist with such jailbreaks for each semester’s new class, Julie Delpy is just, there, credited only as “Lipstick Lesbian”. Looking over the credits again, I guess Mink Stole was in this movie as someone named “Nancy”, but because I’m not a John Waters guy I didn’t know who that was.
I have seen neither of the two high-profile conversion therapy movies that were released in the last couple of years. Why inflict that on myself? I never had to suffer through it myself (though I have friends who did), and those movies seem a little more self-serious than what I can typically put up with. This one’s weird. But I’m a Cheerleader makes light of conversion therapy at the same time that it holds forth on just how misguided and harmful it is. With all the uncanny pastel retro-chic-on-a-budget set designs, it ends up being a fairly distressing watch at times. When DuVall and Lyonne make their final break, the relief doesn’t hit until you’ve given yourself a minute to unclench your jaw.
Malcolm X (1992)
Warner Bros. wanted Norman Jewison to direct Malcolm X. Spike Lee would get the gig in the end, of course, but not before Jewison had already been brought on and sparked a public backlash. Jewison bowed out, citing difficulties with the script, which had been kicking around since the 70s and had passed through so many hands on its eventual route to the version Lee would revise that James Baldwin, one of the original co-writers, had his credit dropped at the request of his family. When Lee ran over his $28 million budget, financial control of the film passed from Warner to the Completion Bond company, who told him that the final cut of the film could not exceed 2 hours and 15 minutes. In May of 1992, 6 months ahead of the movie’s slated release, the Times reported that a group of Black celebrities including Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Janet Jackson, Prince, and Peggy Cooper Cafritz had donated “an undisclosed amount of money” to help Lee finish the film on his own terms. Lee called it a bail out, not a loan. “These are Black folks with some money who came to the rescue of the movie. As a result, this film will be my version. Not the bond company’s version, not Warner Brothers’. I will do the film the way it ought to be, and it will be over three hours.” Malcolm X would gross nearly $50 million at the U.S. box office, receive two Oscar nominations and win neither. (The nominees, Denzel and costume designer Ruth Carter, would eventually receive their due.) In 2010 it was named to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress and for years since it has sat in my Netflix queue waiting for a day when I could make time for it. Saturday mornings in quarantine, it turns out, are ideal for long movies (cf. La Belle Noiseuse).
The movie itself is good, and full of great, memorable moments—when Malcolm first meets Baines in prison, when he disperses the crowd at the hospital, when Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come blares as he fatefully makes his way to the Audobon Ballroom, to name a few. I found it interesting how the filmmaking changed as Malcolm’s life did: the first hour or so of the film is slightly gauzy and, editing-wise, a little bit all over the place, with time to spare for an interminable (not necessarily in a bad way) swing dance scene. The prison and post-prison stretch of the film feel more controlled, though not rigid. The sequence where he goes to Egypt and makes his Hajj seemed to me to be filmed like a National Geographic documentary, but then I suppose there are only so many ways the Egyptian government will let you film the Pyramids.
While writing about this movie I couldn’t help but reflect on the preponderance of calls right now to read more books by and about Black people and racism and, likewise, to watch more movies by and about the same. People learn in all sorts of ways—why limit them to books?—but I do get weary wondering if some people end up doing a disservice to the films, and themselves, if they approach the films primarily as anti-racism educational tools (as so many of them are being framed right now; 13th is probably okay, since that’s its whole raison d’être). I watched Losing Ground a few days before Malcolm X, as I had always intended to, and got a perverse chuckle picturing some well-intentioned hypothetical viewer sitting down with it now and being bored out of their mind by the philosophical repartee about ecstatic experience. This isn’t to say that you couldn’t learn anything from narrative films (or their histories) that would leave you a more informed citizen in the struggle against racial injustice. But maybe let’s be careful not to instrumentalize art in this way. That can too easily turn into asking the filmmakers to be our personal tutors, instead of letting them be artists and humans first.
Da 5 Bloods (2020)
New Spike Lee movies always hit me out of the blue. Does this say more about me and where my attention is, or more about Hollywood and the various public relations arms that build or deny hype for new movies? At the time that I was coming into movie consciousness, Lee was making a string of movies—Red Hook Summer, Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, Chi-Raq—that I considered too niche to bother seeking out. I remember each of those movies coming out to similar fanfare from the media: Where’d this come from? He made this on how little money? or if you’re Richard Brody: Why aren’t we talking about this? Then there was that Oldboy remake that nobody asked for and nobody watches now. Without it occurring to me to wonder why, for that formative period of my life Spike Lee existed on my periphery as a guy who had made some good movies in the 90s and early 2000s but by the 2010s was mostly making independently-financed and -released curios.
If the movies Lee made leading up to BlacKkKlansman were curios, then Da 5 Bloods is the whole curiosity shop. You’ve got Vietnam movie homages, you’ve got three different aspect ratios, you’ve got an opening montage of all the unrest and violence of the 1960s in the U.S. and all over the world. You’ve got shootouts of varying degrees of schlockiness, as well as tense minefield drama. One of the characters (Delroy Lindo, running the gamut of high-intensity emotions both repressed and expressed) is a Black Trump voter. The existence of such folks is apparently a surprise to people; I knew a Black Vietnam vet and enthusiastic Trump supporter who would panhandle outside an office where I used to work. We talked often.
Hanoi Hannah plays a part. The wartime daughter of two characters who by the logic of the movie ought to be over fifty is played by an actress who is 39. Rivers of subtext on American trauma, Vietnamese trauma, and French colonial trauma drift through the film in all directions and ultimately converge in a shootout with a high body count. They say that Martin Scorsese got $160 million or so to shoot The Irishman. Lee clearly did not, and had to opt to have his geriatric main cast reprise their roles in flashbacks, sans de-aging tech, alongside a nimble Chadwick Boseman. It doesn’t feel anything like any other movies getting made by veteran Hollywood talent today, yet Lee makes it all feel so natural. Maybe we’d be less surprised if Hollywood gave more and different kinds of trees their chance to grow.
Gaslight (1944)
To gaslight someone is to cause them to doubt their memory, judgment, and/or reality by way of psychological manipulation, misdirection, or denial. It’s somewhat funny to me how this phenomenon takes its name from the story in this movie (the second film adaptation of a Patrick Hamilton play), because unless I blinked for some key 30 seconds, the gaslight in question is just an incidental part of Gregory (Charles Boyer)’s manipulation of his wife Paula (Ingrid Bergman). When he sneaks into the locked room on the upper floor of the house at night, he needs to turn on the gaslight up there to see; it isn’t an intentional part of his plan that the gaslight in his wife’s bedchamber should consequently dim, although he takes advantage of that fact to convince her she’s going insane. By contrast, he very much does go out of his way to hide a brooch from her with the express purpose of convincing her she lost it. We could call it brooching, I guess, but that doesn’t sound nearly as dramatic.
This was a more painful and upsetting movie than I had somehow been expecting. At a certain point near the end of the film, but before Joseph Cotten arrives to validate her experiences, Paula has become so distraught by the dismissals of her husband and housekeepers and her inability to prove that something fishy is going on that she runs out onto the balcony and lets out a scream that could give you an instant blood clot. Having experienced forms of gaslighting on my own off-and-on for a period of several years, I could relate. What else are you supposed to do in the face of direct and ambient messaging that tries to discredit what you know to be true? Paula gets her comeuppance in the end, where she gets to wield the truth of her newly-recovered sanity over her husband, helplessly tied up to a chair. He tells her to fetch a knife to cut him loose—it’s over there, in that drawer. She goes to look for it—why, it isn’t here. She reaches in. She pulls out the knife. Where could it have gone? I don’t see it anywhere. She drops it. Oh! Was I holding on to it? Oh, but now I don’t know where it’s gone. Her seething anger throughout this scene is disturbing for how triumphantly she channels it. And again I relate. In my head I’ve played out scenarios like this with past tormentors many times. The anger can be addictive, and deep down it isn’t even the point. The longed-for reconciliation is, but that’s something that both parties have to want.
Reading
Angelica Jade Bastién’s 2017 essay on Gone with the Wind is making the rounds again. It’s worth a (re)read:
Treating Gone With the Wind as a relic that should be walled off in museums, as former New York Post critic Lou Lumenick suggested in a 2015 piece, may seem like the corrective necessary after the Academy Awards it’s garnered, its staggering financial success, and decades of worship. It would be simpler, under this guise, to brand Gone With the Wind as a Confederate monument that, despite its gorgeous construction, is too saddled by racism to enjoy, and should be resigned to the past. But that is a half measure. It lets modern Hollywood off the hook for displaying similar, casual racism, albeit in different forms, and modern white people from understanding the thorny truths the film holds.
Documentarian Kirsten Johnson writes about life in the “long middle” for Sight & Sound’s lockdown diary:
Twenty years ago, I was a cameraperson on American Standoff (2002), a documentary by Kristi Jacobson about a truckers’ strike. The strike lasted almost two years. Kristi and I would talk about what felt like our endless filming.
We had shot the beginning of the strike and we knew that the film could only end with the strike’s outcome. But in between, while it was happening – in the ‘long middle’ – we would go back and forth about how much to film and when we might know whether it was about to be over. In the end, we made a 90-minute film. We had filmed hundreds of hours of the ‘long middle’.
There is something about the impossibility of knowing anything that I love about documentary-making and filming the ‘long middle’.
The whole world is in an unprecedented ‘long middle’ together now. Sometime in the future, we will look back and be able to pinpoint when the ‘After’ arrived. For now, each of us can only mark the moment of ‘Before’, even if it functioned as a slowly dawning awareness.
Coming Soon
David Fincher’s Mank is apparently already far enough along in production that Netflix is planning on a fall release? When did this happen? Amanda Seyfried reports that he shot something like 200 takes of every scene, because of course he did.
Although the Cannes Film Festival as we know it won’t be taking place this year, they’ve still announced an official selection of movies they will be promoting and helping to find distribution for as though the movies had benefitted from an actual Cannes premiere. It’s a bit of a strange list, with some obvious headliners—the new Wes Anderson, two movies from Steve McQueen, Disney/Pixar’s Soul, Yeon Sang-Ho’s Train to Busan follow-up—a lot of usual suspects with little appeal to anyone outside Cannes—Naomi Kawase, Maïwenn (someone check on Wesley Morris!)—and an entire section of films by relative newcomers, including, I will note, God’s Own Country director Francis Lee’s lesbian paleontologist period drama with Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan.
Meanwhile, as of this morning, the Venice Film Festival plans on moving forward with its fall edition as planned, red carpet and all. Good luck with that…