A tender distance

She’s a stout 60-year-old widow and cleaning lady of Polish origin. He’s a tall thirtysomething Gastarbeiter, or guest worker, from Morocco. We’re in Munich in the mid-70s. They meet one evening when she steps into the mostly empty bar she’s passed so many times, drawn in by the sensuous, foreign-sounding music. He’s at the bar, dressed in brown suit and brown shirt, hanging with his Moroccan buddies, turning down the sexual favours of a fellow barfly. “Cock broken,” he explains in broken German. The older woman orders cola and sits at a table. The younger man, egged on by his buddies, approaches her. They slow-dance and converse, and the conversation goes on and on, into the night, out of the bar, into the older woman’s foyer, where they take shelter from the rain, and, eventually, into her apartment. Despite its seeming unlikeliness, despite the overwhelming obstacles of rampant, ubiquitous racism, ageism and xenophobia, Emmi (Brigitte Mira) and Ali (El Hedi ben Salem) become lovers, and the story of their love, as told in New German Cinema wunderkind-enfant terrible Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), is that rarest of things: a truly believable movie romance. It’s also a masterpiece. Criterion’s just released it on a beautiful Blu-ray, with a menu featuring a beautiful montage of Emmi and Ali slow-dancing.

Fassbinder wasn’t even 30 when he made this, his 18^th film, which was inspired by two other films: The American Soldier (1970), Fassbinder’s early feature in which a character relays the story of a cleaning lady in love with an immigrant worker, and All That Heaven Allows (1955), Douglas Sirk’s melodrama in which Jane Wyman’s bourgeois widow falls in love with Rock Hudson’s young gardener. (In turn, Todd Haynes would draw inspiration from All That Heaven Allows and from Fear Eats the Soul to produce his 2002 film Far From Heaven.) Though Emmi and Ali’s love is threatened at every turn by the stupidity and cruelty of friends, neighbours, strangers, family and co-workers, Feat Eats the Soul, echoing Sirk, ends on a sombre but more optimistic note than the American Solider anecdote. But I would argue that more than anything that happens in its story, what makes Fear Eats the Soul so moving, fascinating and generous of heart is Fassbinder’s singular directorial approach—the same high style that you’d think would make the film alienating.

Few filmmakers have utilized aspects of theatre in any meaningful way. One of those few is Fassbinder, whose theatre practice was as prolific as his cinema practice. Right from the start, with those deep reds and yellows, there’s a sumptuous unity of production and costume design, lighting and photography, that both bears the influence of All That Heaven Allows’ Technicolor palate and at an expressionistic theatrical style—which creates a captivating contrast with the clean, muted acting of the cast, most especially Mira, a veteran thespian, and Salem, who appeared in several Fassbinder films and was for a time Fassbinder’s boyfriend. Above all, what distinguishes Fear Eats the Soul is Fassbinder’s loving, counterintuitive mise en scène. In scene after scene Fassbinder’s characters share the most intimate exchanges while his camera watches from a considerable distance, often with telling objects or framing devices in the foreground. There’s such tenderness is this distance, as though Fassbinder is holding his actors, cradling them, in the centre of the screen. He would continue to use framing (most memorably in a romantic scene that becomes a murder scene in Berlin Alexanderplatz), but I don’t know that any subsequent Fassbinder ever achieved quite the same feeling of belief in love as is found here.

                     

Fairy tale goes fashionably retro-formalist

Spanish writer/director Pablo Berger’s second feature transports the titular Brothers Grimm fairy tale—Blancanieves is a literal translation of Snow White—to a mythical 1920s Andalucia brimming with flamenco dancers, bullfighters and other such regional kitsch. In keeping with the period setting, Berger relays his vaguely feminist revision as a monochromatic silent film, replete with title cards and antiquated effects. I attended a number of film festivals over the course of the last year where the film was screening and noticed a consistently divided response: viewers seemed either charmed or irritated. I fell more into the latter camp—in part because of the film’s incessant camp.

To give credit to the complexity of both Berger’s motives and the film’s layered qualities, Blancanieves is a peculiar beast, at once an obvious labour of love—the film could hardly have been easy to finance—and a work shrewdly calibrated to adhere to current cinephile fashion, such as retro formalism—à la Tabu, The Artist and Guy Maddin’s entire career—and fairy tale re-visitation, evident in various other recent versions of Snow White. It is an ostensible love letter to some Spanish past but is shamelessly pitched to an international market, sticking closely as it does to the broadest possible cultural stereotypes. It felt to me both pandering and academic, which is a rare enough combination, I suppose. Perhaps it is too much the supposedly critic friendly film—the sort that brings out the unfriendly side of this critic.

Our heroine is one Carmen (Macarena García), daughter of a beloved toreador (Mexican actor Daniel Giménez Cacho) and a flamenco dancer (Inma Cuesta). Mom dies in childbirth, dad gets paralyzed by a bull named Lucifer, and so along comes Encarna (Maribel Verdú, Y Tu Mamá También). Like Phyllis Nirdlinger in Double Indemnity, Encarna worms her way into the family via her role as a kindly nurse, but once she assumes the role of stepmother she proves plenty wicked. The most appealing, iconoclastic spin on the familiar renditions of Snow White is the way Berger imbues Carmen with more agency and grit. Gender restrictions be damned, this Snow White is following Dad’s slippered footsteps into the ring. She becomes a great bullfighter. What else? Oh, the dwarves. There are seven of them. I guess they’re kind of funny.

I frequently felt frustrated by Blancanieves’ simplistic emotional landscape and its insistence on slavishly appropriating silent era tics without bringing anything very fresh to the exercise (this is what I meant when I called it academic). My favourite scene by far was the final, somber one, tinged with tragedy and genuine mystery. Yet when I saw the film for the first time in Toronto, Berger immediately took the stage afterwards for a Q&A and rather smugly confessed that he deliberately chose an ambiguous finale because he figured that would make the film seem smarter. So if it seems like I’m picking on the film, let me say that it’s kind of asking to be picked on. If you’re willing to simply take pleasure in its handsomely photographed surfaces, you probably won’t feel as ornery. 

                      

Fleet, insightful, funny ha Ha

I remember 27, more meaningful than 21 or 30. I remember somehow knowing it would be transformative, even if I did little to actively transform myself. “27 is old,” as someone asserts in Frances Ha, but it’s young too. Certain peers stop excusing you for certain shortcomings, but few will write you off completely if you don’t get your shit together. 27 is suspension, wariness, looming threats of something called maturity, and persistent opportunities for parties to be prolonged. Everything I just wrote is wildly subjective, but it’s a subjectivity shared with the fleet, utterly unimposing yet cumulatively insightful new comedy directed by Noah Baumbach and written by Baumbach and the film’s star, Greta Gerwig. The titular heroine of Frances Ha is 27, mostly adrift, clinging to sketchy, outdated dreams, and to an idea of friendship that seems set to expire any second.

Frances and Sophie (Mickey Sumner) are best friends and roommates living in Brooklyn. They share nearly everything, including, most nights, a bed. They are “like a lesbian couple that doesn’t have sex anymore.” When in need of comfort, Frances asks Sophie to “tell me the story of us,” a ritual to maintain an adolescent fantasy image of the friends-as-power couple, conquering some corner of the world, Sophie’s being the publishing industry, Frances’ being the world of dance. About that: one of the elements I love about Frances Ha is how perfectly believable and preposterous it is that Frances wants to be a dancer. She can’t quite coordinate her body to do things like walk fluidly. She doesn’t look entirely comfortable, or grounded, while sitting in a chair or shadowing a guest at a party where she’s working as a server. In one scene she fumbles with a sandwich like she’s still learning to eat. Most of her movements seem involuntary: the way conversation with Sophie automatically prompts illustrative physical gestures even when they’re only speaking on the phone. Frances Ha is above all a character study, and Gerwig brings to just the right balance of self-effacing self-analysis and actor’s craft. Her character is adorable yet maddeningly passive. She’s makes you laugh, makes you crazy, breaks your heart if you’re in the unfortunate position of trying to be her boyfriend, or something. The film’s story, as such, is about Sophie moving in with her boyfriend and trying to grow up, and Frances missing Sophie wanting to follow her lead without having much of an idea as to how.

Baumbach has sculpted Frances Ha with a pretty irresistible sort of comic charisma. Much of the film is comprised of short, abrupt scenes, with hard cuts to sound and image, whose connections are not always obvious, just a line here, a gesture there, creating an inherently buoyant, clipped rhythm, as engagingly disjointed as Frances’ daily life. The photography is black and white, with a level of fuzziness that invokes present-tense nostalgia. Along with early Truffaut, Woody Allen is an obvious influence, not only in the silvery views of New York but in the patter, the urbane vernacular, the particular use of music over montage, and the title cards that state each address Frances inhabits, however briefly. Frances claims to have trouble leaving places, yet once her living situation with Sophie falls apart all she does is leave. She moves in with two dudes and their liquor trolley. She embarks on a Christmas visit to the folks in Sacramento, and takes an impulsive, poorly planned trip to Paris. For all her apparent inertia, Frances does indeed movie, perhaps most memorably in a sequence that finds her doing nothing more than skipping, dancing, scurrying down several Manhattan blocks to David Bowie’s ‘Modern Love.’ It’s a lovely scene of a young woman still capable of fleeing her own ample self-consciousness and giving in to the sheer propulsion of a given moment. Frances Ha is all about moments, this one and this one and this. And it has just enough of them to make us feel like we’ve really come to know some substantial, larger moment within a single life, a moment—27—that will surely transform the bearer of that life in a permanent, lasting way. 

        

Cultivation theory

The titular damsels of writer/director Whit Stillman’s new movie, his first in 14 years, are in each pretty, preppy, poised and alert to the world in their highly selective way. Each are named after flowers, each are odour-sensitive, each strives to use their ostensibly superior ethical, intellectual and interactive skills to fortify the quality of student life at Seven Oaks College. Their tactics include suicide prevention through tap-dancing (the handmade poster on wall of the suicide prevention center reads COME ON, IT’S NOT THAT BAD!) and going out with boys who are neither handsome, nor charming, nor smart. (One of them is so dumb he doesn’t even know his colours.) By rewarding the male doofi (that’s plural for doofus) of Seven Oaks with their companionship, these damsels feel they can usher these doofi from the life of aimless idiocy to which they seem surely destined to a more enlightened and socially meaningful place. Of course, dating doofi also prevents the damsels from experiencing such annoying unpleasantries as heartbreak.

Herein lays the very special comic tone that Stillman aspires to and frequently apprehends in Damsels in Distress: whether or not his characters are actually from privilege they each work arduously to cultivate both the airs and the sense of altruistic vocation they associate with privilege, and such airs and ambitions constitute both the damsels’ folly and their persistent charisma. Most are well-intentioned emotional cowards, but Stillman knows that there’s more to be gained from sympathizing with them and their quixotic pretentions than looking down his nose at them. You might have hated these damsels from a distance when you went to school with them, but viewed through Stillman’s generous, stylized, idiosyncratic gaze, they become people you want to spend more time with.

Perhaps idiosyncratic is putting things too mildly. The movie’s chief damsel, Violet, is always, even in casual conversation, speaking lines like, “Must we tether ourselves from comment because we ourselves are human too?” She sounds out each word carefully, ensures that each sentence is complete, and doing so bears little resemblance to the sorts of characters found in virtually any contemporary American youth comedy. Fortunately she’s played by Greta Gerwig, the actress (and occasional writer and director) probably most closely associated with such (if you’ll excuse my use of this very stupid genre title) “mumblecore” movies as Hannah Takes the Stairs, Baghead and House of the Devil. Gerwig’s definitely not mumbling here. In fact, I’d go so far as to suggest that in Gerwig Stillman’s found his ideal actor, one who intuits the cadences of his anachronistic comic style and embodies the delicate imbalance of his quirky, sometimes fabulous character conceits.

Which isn’t to say that everything in Damsels flies. The meandering quality of the narrative eventually catches up with itself, and a closing musical sequence is neither awkward enough nor elegant enough to keep from falling flat. But it does have the funniest suicide attempt I think I’ve seen in a movie, its use of motel-issue soap as an agent of soul-healing is hilariously absurd, and, more importantly, its central characters are never given anything less than a slew of contradictions, conflicting desires and other compelling complications. They are, to be sure, comic constructs, but they also resonate with lived experience, which is what good comedy is all about.