A deep kind of blue

In a coal-smeary London still recovering from the Blitz, in rooms of hanging smoke in which despair nestles in the wallpaper, in the backseats of cars and back corners of bars, in the lonely hollows of tube stations and the yellow gloom of side streets we find this unnervingly gorgeous, desperate woman struggling to find something to do with the most potent item in her possession: desire. Neither gender has it very easy when it comes to the expression, much less the fulfillment of real longing in postwar England, but the women, those meant to be desired rather than to do the desiring, hold a special challenge (a theme you'll find fleshed out in greater depth by our articulate friend over at Feminéma). 

This is the milieu of The Deep Blue Sea, Terrence Davies’ adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s 1952 play. It begins, in a sense, where Davies’ adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth left off: with a woman alone in a room with suicide. This, what we used to call a woman’s picture, is a story of transgression as recklessly valiant as it is inevitably destructive: Hester (a particularly brilliant, courageous, and sexy Rachel Weisz) is married to William (Simon Russell Beale), a judge, portly, much older than she, a mama’s boy, and very tender-loving in a way that has nothing to do with passion. Hester leaves William for Freddie (Tom Hiddleston), a lanky former RAF pilot who happens to be a war hero, a would-be bon vivant in silly ascots, a guy who lets a woman know when she gets his engine running, and a cad, neglectful, and not much more sensitive to the scope of Hester’s needs than William. So, if you’ll forgive the blunt language, this is about a woman trying to choose between a man who forgets her birthday and a man who forgets to fuck her. And it’s just about perfectly realized by Davies and his collaborators, at once raw and elegant, generous and merciless: people have their reasons, and Davies finds reasons to sympathize with everyone.

1950s England is also the milieu where Davies seems most at home, the milieu of his childhood, the one that allows him to stage people singing the good old songs in pubs (the director’s favourite on-screen activity). Shot by Florian Hoffmeister, the film glows with mostly muted colours under flickering penumbra—for the first 20 minutes I wondered if the projector’s lamp was burning out—and the elegiac strains of a Samuel Barber violin concerto. The décors, the details in behaviour—the lick of a shoulder, or the bowed head that accompanies the giving of an achingly ill-chosen gift—are all so much of a piece. But I think what I admire most about The Deep Blue Sea is its delicate balance of the subtle and the explicit. Hester’s curtains are freighted with symbolism, and characters actually speak aloud phrases like “Beware of passion.” Yet in the hands of these fine actors even the most on-the-nose dialogue brims with subtext. At its best, Davies’ work exudes an intuitive understanding of the richness of melodrama, that potentially sublime interplay between surface and depth. Even in the film’s seemingly straightforward bookend device we can trace an over-arcing lyricism: in the final shot the camera pulls back from Hester’s window, glides down the face of her rooming house, then down the street, then toward this rubble where there was once a building, and I couldn’t help but notice: that bomb just missed her.

"...it was always the camera and me": Stephanie Sigman on being held captive by Miss Bala

Unfolding in bracing, often unnervingly confusing scenes constructed from lengthy methodical takes, the dominant tone of Miss Bala (a bleak pun of a title, exchanging “Baja,” as in Baja, California, for “bala,” as in bullet) is one of traumatized trance. The film follows Laura Guerrero (Stephanie Sigman), a 23-year-old living somewhere above the poverty line with her father and little brother, somewhere on the outskirts of a city we presume to be Tijuana. Apparently on a whim, Laura decides to enter a beauty contest and, by sheer chance, subsequently becomes the pawn of a gang of drug traffickers, led by the very scary yet quietly charismatic Lino (Noe Hernandez). He sees something special in her, some unique utility. A moll? A hostage? A Mata Hari? It’s not entirely clear. What is clear is that Laura’s fear-fuelled helplessness and forced collaboration leave her caught in a catch-22 that’s more or less symbolic of the current plight of Mexico as a whole, in the grips of a drug war that just seems to get worse.

Shifting radically from the giddy, cutty, winkily melodramatic Godardisms of his 2008 tween-lovers-on-the-run film Voy a explotar!, director and co-scenarist Gerardo Naranjo has his camera hold very, very closely to Laura, who spends much of Miss Bala frozen in a state of shock, rarely speaking but almost always busy, running, crawling, hiding, changing clothes, following instructions. We can’t know what she’s thinking, even in the scenes that require some calculation on her part, but we often know how she’s feeling, thanks to the peculiar doggedness of the film’s MO and to Sigman’s passive yet highly nuanced performance. Miss Bala is chilling, relentless, intelligent, and, if one’s inclined to notice, quite funny in a dark, dry, acid sort of way (my favourite example: the flaming tire that rolls through one especially chaotic scene of street violence like it's fallen loose from a Mel Brooks picture). It’s absolutely a must-see for many reasons, some aesthetic, some sociological. And one of those reasons is Sigman, a skillful novice with excellent instincts, particularly when it comes to cultivating a sense of intimacy with the camera, and thus with us.

I spoke with Sigman during last year’s Toronto International Film Festival. She was very friendly, very excited, very forgiving of both my Spanish and my hangover, very tall in her blue dress and heels, and not altogether difficult to look at.

JB: How closely related are the stories of Laura Guerrero and Laura Zúñiga, the Sinaloa beauty queen whose ties to trafficking presumably inspired Miss Bala?

Stephanie Sigman: I don’t think they’re similar at all. It’s impossible for us to know what really happened to Laura Zúñiga. That’s one of the reasons why Gerardo made this a fiction. Of course, her story is symptomatic of a lot of things that are happening in Mexico, so it was useful to research. But because we went in a very different direction I didn’t want to focus too much on her.

JB: It seems to me that one of the major challenges for you would be that you’re the protagonist, you’re present in every scene, yet you’re far more reactive than you are active. Much is done to Laura, but she herself doesn’t really move the story forward.

SS: It’s funny, but I don’t think I was very conscious of that challenge while we were actually in production. When I saw the final film I was kind of shocked. I guess I couldn’t imagine how the pieces were going to fit. It’s weird to see yourself up there. There were moments when I actually forgot that it was me I was looking at. I would grab my chair, start to react like any other person in the cinema. It was exciting! [Laughs]

JB: Even though Laura spends most of Miss Bala in this state of suspended trauma, one of the great things about your performance is its gradations. There are distinct levels of panic or confusion or resignation. You’re always doing something that, for the most part, only we in the audience can pick up on. 

SS: Yeah, it was always the camera and me. It’s just the nature of this movie—there are only about 130 cuts in the whole thing, so what happens in any one shot is really important. Single moments go on for a long time. So I had to contain, contain, contain. We needed to keep Laura passive, which I think was Gerardo’s way of commenting on the passive nature of a lot of Mexicans right now—people just don’t know what to do anymore. But at the same time there’s a lot of things going on inside that needs to be expressed somehow.

JB: You grew up in Sonora. Has your life become more affected by violence, given how things have been escalating these last several years?

SS: You’re always hearing stories about a friend of a friend, but I feel like its getting closer. The degrees of separation are fewer. That’s pretty frightening. Things have definitely gotten worse since when I was there just five years ago.

JB: I remember back when Mexico City seemed kind of scary. These days it feels like the safest place in the country.

SS: [Laughs] Yes, that reversal still seems funny to me.

JB: Obviously Laura’s ambition to become a beauty queen is different than your ambition to act, but still I wonder if that was an aspect of her character that you could relate to.

SS: I feel like most girls at some point wants to be models or beauty queens, to have something to do with the idea of beauty. I never wanted to be Miss Mexico, but I did want to model. I was in a contest, and I didn’t win. I think every girl has that princess fantasy. But that might be a very Latin American thing.

JB: That’s interesting that you were trying to model, because I would think modeling skills would come in handy in a film like Miss Bala. Again, so much of what’s required of you is to convey something powerful and specific with just a look, or with body language.

SS: Maybe. Certainly models need to have a special awareness of the camera; even when many things are going on you have to have that undistracted relationship to the camera.

JB: Throughout Miss Bala, Lino calls Laura “Canelita,” or “Little Cinnamon.” Is that because of the colour of her skin, not too dark, not too pale?

SS: I think it has something to do with that, but it also has something to do with a story about Lino himself. Noe told me that it was related to something from Lino’s youth, some girl that Laura reminded him of.

JB: Was there a lot of that? Did you all bring in backstories?

SS: I would write things, but just for myself. I prefer not to share them, because the great thing about the seeing a movie is when it stimulates your imagination and lets you figure things out on your own.

JB: I can only imagine that spending so much time in Laura’s skin could leave one feeling deeply unsettled, kind of wrung out. Were you able to shake off the residual effects of the role?

SS: I was afraid of that. I kept thinking that I was spending more than 12 hours a day in this character, and that she might start to become me. There comes a point when you start to talk like the character, eat like the character, dream like the character. But by the end I was very, very ready to lose Laura, to let her go. So I did. Just like that. 

Avengeance can be tiring

Gathering together a diverse crew of Marvel Comics all-stars—some already well into their respective movie adaptation franchises—to collectively combat the threat of intergalactic totalitarianism, The Avengers, helmed by Joss Whedon, is something of a super-hero clearing house: Want some more of that witty Iron Man? How about we throw in a little Hawkeye with that? Remember him? But the result of more bang for your buck can feel an awful lot like a monster truck rally that just never seems to end, a parade of virtually indestructible big dudes in funny suits beating the shit out of each other for 143 minutes, a marathon of dazzling fights that will leave you punch-drunk and exhausted. At least there are indeed some funny lines. And yes, Scarlett Johansson does wear latex well.

Should I describe the plot? Do you have an hour to spare? Got your super-encyclopedia handy? No? Okay, here’s the haiku version:

                        Spooky energy

                        Makes portal for aliens.

                        Super folk unite!

It begins with the flamboyant arrival of Loki (Tom Hiddleston) at a secret S.H.I.E.L.D. base where they house the Tesseract, a glowing cube that may or may not be aiding the development of weapons of mass destruction. In case you don’t know who Loki is, there’s some expository dialogue to help you out: “Loki,” gasps Dr. Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgård), “brother of Thor!” (If you don’t know who Thor is, you should probably just give up now.) “Freedom is life’s great lie,” says Loki, who wants humanity to kneel before him, forcibly, if necessary. So S.H.I.E.L.D.’s one-eyed director Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) tracks down Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) to trap Loki and recover the Tesseract. Complications ensue, various feisty alpha-males learn to play nice, half of Manhattan is destroyed, et cetera.

That clever dialogue I mentioned is accompanied by much dumbness: a token gay character (Clark Gregg) who never stops reminding you that he’s the gay one; a presumably staggering civilian death count without a single image of anyone getting hurt; Iron Man’s boasting of his skyscraper powered by self-sustainable energy, while Iron Man’s jetpacks suck up more juice than a fleet of Hummers, his girlfriend regularly takes her private jet along the eastern seaboard, and the entire S.H.I.E.L.D. team whips all over the world in an invisible flying fucking aircraft carrier. Of course there are nice details, like the S.H.I.E.L.D. engineer who plays Atari when no one’s looking, a cameo by a certain beloved character actor, and Ruffalo’s pleasingly incongruent nuance, but the bulk of the pleasures to be found here are brute ones, mostly featuring Hulk ripping apart alien aircraft with a mighty roar. I’m not being facetious; Hulk ripping shit apart can be hugely entertaining. All I want to say is that there’s a point when this sassy, busy, carefully designed, emotionally shallow, mega-budget Wrestlemania pummels the viewer’s senses in such a way that it makes he or she want to transform into their own raging green Id-monster, screaming, “Okay, okay, I got my $13 worth! I don’t care if the Chitauri leader comes back after the end-credits. Let me out of here already!”

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.