Hard to get down

Cake is one of these films you might feel sort of bullied into liking, or at least respecting, because it deals with heavy themes of grief and living with chronic pain and drug addiction among the white and affluent, because it features an ostensibly unlikable heroine whom we’re meant to come to love because we witness some arduous process of redemption, because it stars an actor who became famous years ago when she was young and bubbly and had influential hair, and here she is with greasy hair, facial scars, dumpy clothes and a shit attitude. But that bullying you feel is integral to Cake’s cookie-cutter schematics. Cake chokes on its own dramaturgy, its only icing here being that, yes, Jennifer Aniston, also conspicuously on board as executive producer, is pretty good as the blunt, un-ingratiating heroine whose body was mangled in some terrible accident and whose heart became paralyzed after the devastating loss of a loved one in that same accident. Without Aniston, or someone like her, Cake would not have been made, and without Aniston you would certainly have considerably less reason to watch it.

The set-up has plenty of intrigue: Claire (Aniston) seems to be stalking Nina (Anna Kendrick), a dead woman, who was in Claire’s cartoonish chronic pain support group, perhaps because Nina suicided and Claire envies her gumption. Claire blackmails her support group leader into disclosing Nina’s address so that Claire can go snoop around Nina’s home, which is still inhabited by Nina’s little boy and—look out!—her hunky husband (Sam Worthington). Also intriguing: Claire’s only other occupation is to feed her need for Percs and Oxys, which, in one of Cake’s better sequences, she enlists her devoted Chicana housekeeper Silvana (Adriana Barraza) to drive her down to Tijuana to procure. But the intrigue quickly dissipates once we get stuck watching the lamely written sequences in which Nina appears to Claire as some sort of bitchy ghost, or bitchy hallucination brought on by addiction and self-loathing. There’s also the issue of Claire really never seeming that unlikable a person—just one of many ways in which Cake goes soft. No doubt some will applaud Barraza, who got an Oscar nod for Babel, but those applauding surely don’t speak Spanish, because when Barraza goes to town, airing her grievances toward her employer en español, it is a flatly inflected tirade worthy of a telenovela hitting end-of-the-week exhaustion. Don’t even get me started on the ridiculous character of a would-be starlet and thief from Boise who gets conveniently and awkwardly squashed into Cake’s final act. To be sure, there are far worse movies than Cake, but the ways in which Cake is bad are really annoying.

                

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.

                     

Some cinema cannot be erased from your head

This is the story of Henry Spenser (Jack Nance), a factory printer, so wary of yet helplessly drawn to women. His orb-like eyes seem fixed on some unseen abyss, their shape echoed by that of the lumpy unnamed planet inside of which a scaly man (legendary production designer Jack Fisk) pulls levers and apparently sends some spermatozoon-like worm-thing down to earth. The worm-thing reappears in the guise of Henry’s unexpected progeny; the excitable mother of his very nervous girlfriend Mary (Little House’s Charlotte Stewart) informs Henry of his paternity during a family dinner of man-made chickens. Henry assumes his responsibilities and has Mary and the baby move into his tiny apartment where a framed photograph of an atomic explosion serves as the sole decoration. But baby gets sick, Mary disappears, and Henry seems prone to fantasy. He dreams of a lady in his radiator, who has facial abscesses, sings Fats Waller and does a dance that seems to give Henry permission to kill the ailing creature said to be his child.

Inspired by Kafka and the Surrealists, David Lynch’s feature debut is a masterpiece of painstaking craft and unfettered imagination. Ordinary anxieties manifest as hallucinatory strangeness throughout Eraserhead (1977): fear of commitment and family, fear of death and decay, fear of sex and women—Henry is seduced by the beguiling older woman who lives across the hall, a character who will return in the form of Dorothy Valens in Blue Velvet (1986). They make love in a steaming vat.

With its sound design industrial drones and distant roller rink music, its gorgeous black and white photography by Herbert Caldwell and Frederick Elmes—who would later shoot Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart (1990)—and its desolate landscapes of dirt mounds, monolithic buildings and dank puddles, the film offers an unusually immersive experience. Lynch initially studied visual art, and Eraserhead is as much sculptural object as it is movie. 

I first saw Eraserhead when I was 17. I took someone—a beguiling older woman, in fact—to a midnight screening. When the lights came up she asked me if I actually liked her. She was offended that I took her to this thing, which admittedly may not be an ideal date movie. I stuttered some apology—while secretly revelling in what I’d just beheld—but she was inconsolable. I don’t know what happened to her—I hope she recovered—but Eraserhead has remained imprinted upon my murkiest grey matter ever since. And I can now render its damage even more permanently!: Criterion has just released a gorgeous, generously supplemented DVD and BD Eraserhead package. 

Lynch: the multiple tie years

On one of those generous Criterion supplements, David Lynch tells a story about how one day, as a young art student in Philadelphia, he was working on this painting. Green plants were slowly emerging from a blackened canvas. Then he heard wind and, somehow, he saw the canvas move. He realized that this was just what he wanted, to make a painting that has a sound and that moves. It’s as eloquent a description as I’ve heard of how an artist transitions from one medium to another, how discoveries made in one medium feed the other. The amazing collection of short films included in Criterion’s package, illustrate, along with Eraserhead,  Lynch’s transition from canvas to celluloid, tearing the lid off one of the most fecund imaginations in modern cinema.

Nowhere is the nature of this transition more apparent than in Lynch’s first 4-minute animated film, ‘Six Men Getting Sick’ (1967), a fusion of Francis Bacon and Jean-Luc Godard. The title is a synopsis: there are indeed six sick men. Soil keeps rising up to their necks, internal organs keep haemorrhaging, a siren keeps surging and fading, mouths keep spilling blood. Life is reduced to an emergency loop. The grotesque is rendered as beautiful trauma. Stunning.

Based on a dream had by his wife’s niece, ‘The Alphabet’ (1968) features a girl in a bed with problems. Red lips are licked in an iris. Letters give off ectoplasm. There’s a profound unease with language at the base of this, or it not language per se then with signifiers or meaning, which makes sense: Lynch would have to give himself permission to elide overt meanings in order to make narrative films.

At 33 minutes, ‘The Grandmother’ (1970) is Lynch’s first sustained exercise in merging the aesthetics of painting and sculpture with those of live-action cinema—not to mention theatre, as there are potent references to kabuki and the absurd in this tale of an abused boy who grows a grandmother for consolation by literally soiling his sheets and wetting his bed. Patricidal fantasies are acted out on a proscenium stage, birthing imagery is accompanied by the sound of protracted diarrhoea. Dark wonder and secret liberation underline ‘The Grandmother,’ which is largely silent and seems most indebted to the two Jeans: Vigo and Cocteau.

A nurse, played by Lynch himself, gives a sort of pedicure to a woman’s leaky stump as she writes a letter in ‘The Amputee’ (1974), a film that came about mainly because Frederick Elmes, who would shoot most of Eraserhead, was asked to test a pair of black and white video stocks. By Lynch standards it is a work of very limited visual allure, but it is characteristically strange and intriguing. 

The final short included in Criterion’s set was produced decades after Eraserhead yet feels of a piece with the other works here on account of its inky-fuzzy chiaroscuro painterliness and extreme compaction. Commissioned as part of the Lumière and Company project, which supplied 41 filmmakers with the Lumière brothers’ very first wood, metal and glass camera and acetate film stock, ‘Premonitions Following an Evil Deed’ (1995) features police, a scary room, and flames: an excellent set of basic ingredients for a Lynch film, something that bubbles up from the unconscious to beguile, trouble, arouse and amuse. 

                            

Looking without seeing, enlarging until vanishing

Blowup (1966) found Michelangelo Antonioni at the peak of his renown, yet, rather than resting on his laurels, he was embracing all things new. Following the astonishing Red Desert (1964), it was only his second film in colour, and every arresting hue feels precisely selected and shot-through with wonder. Blowup was Antonioni’s first film in English, with dialogues written by playwright Edward Bond. Most notably, while Antonioni was already well into middle-age, Blowup is immersed in the youth culture of its moment, its costumes colourful, scanty and modern, its London fully swinging, populated with the likes of Jane Birkin, Verushka and the Yardbirds, and with kids running wild in the streets, or anyway as wild as a troupe of mimes can get. We see these merry-making mimes flood into frame at Blowup’s beginning and at its end, when they enjoy a tennis match sans ball or rackets, serving as a reminder that the visible world is riddled with illusion. Is seeing believing, or is the reverse true? Is a photograph a way of obscuring reality or does it reveal a reality we’d otherwise never see? These questions haunt Blowup—and, as is often the case with Antonioni, they’re questions that will remain dutifully unresolved.

An unnamed photographer (David Hennings) takes photos of a man and a woman in a park. The woman (Vanessa Redgrave) demands the negatives. The photographer tells her she has to wait as he has other things on the roll. Eventually the photographer develops the film, makes prints of the images taken in the park, and, as takes photos of the photos, enlarging one detail until it becomes clearer and then more abstract, he comes to believe that he’s photographed a crime. The script was put together by Antonioni and Tonino Guerra, but a prominent credit is given to a story, alternately translated as ‘Blowup’ or ‘The Devil’s Drool,’ by the great Argentine author Julio Cortázar. It’s a generous credit, in that what happens in Blowup echoes its source material only in essence; its characters, setting and situation are very different. But Antonioni was an artist who appreciated just how rare a truly perfect idea is—and the idea of Cortázar’s story is so good it inspired at least two more excellent movies, Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) and Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (1981), though both cleverly trade photography for sound recording.

It must be said that Blowup does nothing to counter Antonioni’s tendency to put utterly unpleasant men at the centre of his films. Ostensibly based on photographer David Bailey, Blowup’s protagonist is a prick, treating models in a way that alternately reads as sexual harassment or verbal abuse. Still, watching him work is fascinating, and his lack of empathy, or rather, his overwhelming focus on his own creative work, drives the story forward in a way that a more sensitive and sociable protagonist wouldn’t have managed. All he wants is the most compelling, most beautiful, most mysterious images possible, and if he has to disguise himself as a homeless person, scream at models or put himself in danger to get these images, so be it. Though on first glimpse Blowup seems locked in time, a closer examination reveals a timeless notion at its heart, something about truth and technology, and what happens when the world is broken down into frozen fragments. Which begs the question: where is the Blowup for our digital age?   

                 

Winter vortex

We are in the wintry Midwest and even the spacing of the opening titles looks desolate. The swell of Carter Burwell’s score as a car makes it over a rise in a blizzard briefly invokes the western—later on certain transitional cues will echo Bernard Herrmann’s music for Taxi Driver (1976)—but Fargo (1995) is very much a ’90s crime film, a semi-rural neo-noir where violence and humiliation is played for laughs. Most crime films of the ’90s seemed pitched as black comedies, so it’s no wonder that the Coen Brothers cemented their prominence in that decade, collecting Academy Awards while prompting a critical backlash that’s never quite abated. It’s been noted ad nauseam that the Coens don’t display the appropriate amount of love for their characters, whatever that means, and indeed Fargo often seems in the grips of a cruel hand, its motley criminals mined for amusement while dangling on the hook that’ll ultimately flay them. But Fargo also has one of the most iconoclastic heroines in the movies. Like most of the film’s small town Minnesotans, Brainerd Police Chief Margie Olmstead-Gunderson (Frances McDormand, brilliant and totally at ease) speaks with sunny amiability and an accent or cadence, generously peppered with those “ya, ya”s that harken back to the region’s Swedish heritage, that begs to be taken for naïve if not moronic by urban sophisticates. But Margie, who doesn’t even enter the film until it’s a third over, proves herself a well of humble intelligence and know-how. She is a chipper, very pregnant, female Colombo, and near-impossible not to love.

The rest of Fargo’s personage are easy to loathe and, in keeping with noir fatalism, speak to some fundamental, inescapable corruption at the core of everything. Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy, a vivid, nuanced cartoon), a car salesman drowning in financial ruin of his own doing, arranges the kidnapping of his own wife, Jean (Kristin Rudrüd), by far the film’s crudest character, played mostly as hysterical but whose terror I find too awful to giggle at. Even Jerry’s adolescent son understands how things can go horribly wrong—maybe he’s been watching Coen Brothers films? Jerry hears about a pair of crooks named Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi, groomed as John Waters if John Waters bought his clothes at flea markets) and Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare, convincingly disaffected) from Shep Proudfoot (Steve Reevis, in a steely, explosive cameo), a Native American mechanic with a fraught past. Carl is a babbling sociopath, while Gaear barely speaks, perhaps because he spends all of his time holding vigil for the first opportunity to kill an innocent bystander. What kind of idiot would trust these two with his wife?

Greed and stupidity constitute the twin engines of Fargo, which is ostensibly based on a true story, though some of its narrative masterstrokes—i.e.: the emergence of a man named Mike Yanagita, or an extensive conversation between two parkas—must surely the product of the skewed imaginations of the authors, Minnesotans both. Theirs is a cold and nasty world—no country for old men or pregnant women—in which people like Margie seem the minority. That final scene: Margie, who’s just seen a man shoved into a wood chipper with a 2x4, who’s two months away from giving birth, snuggles with Norm (John Carroll Lynch, endearingly sedated), whose painting has just been selected for a measly three-cent stamp, and warmly urges him to look on the bright side of things. It’s not exactly a happy ending, but in the Coens’ filmography it’s about as happy as things usually get.