Ten Years Ago: The Shape of Things

In her last re-view, Stevi Costa promised “an intellectual contemplation about the body, art, and performance.” Lo and behold, here’s another look at Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things.

 

Moralists have no place in an art gallery.

That’s the phrase imprinted on the wall of the gallery at Evelyn’s MFA exhibition project “She Loves Me Not,” a human sculpture made from her “boyfriend” Adam using only manipulation as “her palate knife.” Evelyn’s MFA thesis is the twist ending in of Neil LaBute’s play-turned-film, The Shape of Things, the third act revelation that undoes the otherwise realistic portrait of a relationship between an eccentric graduate student artist and her somewhat dweeby undergraduate partner. For two acts, we see Adam transform from meek and schlubby to downright, well, Paul Rudd attractive (apt, as he is played by Paul Rudd) because of his relationship with Evelyn. She convinces him to have confidence in himself, we think. He learns to eat better. He learns to take pride in his appearance. Gets new clothes. A better haircut. Even some elective cosmetic surgery. And all because we’re led to believe that love has made him want to be a better person.

But what Evelyn’s thesis exhibition reveals is that her relationship with Adam has all been an act, a careful faux seduction to see if she could create a work of art out of a human body. As much art project as sociology experiment, Evelyn’s project reveals that as Adam transformed physically into a more conventionally attractive individual, so, too did his morals begin to shift into questionable territory: a tryst with his best friend’s fiancée, numerous lies about the details of that event to all parties involved, and, eventually, cutting off contact with Phillip and Jenny (best friend and fiancée) at Evelyn’s request. Evelyn does not offer an argument about what this project should be taken as, or understood as. She offers it merely for our consideration, without comment or further analysis, and asks us to accept the premise that this is art, and, moreover, the kind of art that changes the world.

The first time you watch The Shape of Things, it is a mindfuck. The scene I describe above is supposed to take you by surprise. Yet on any rereading or reviewing, it absolutely shouldn’t. Because that’s how reading works. The Shape of Things is fundamentally a text that asks you to interrogate it, to look for the places where Evelyn’s calculated construction of Adam shows itself, like a Renaissance painting that, through years of exposure, reveals the cartoon underneath. We’re told several times that she’s working on her MFA thesis, but what, exactly, she is working on is never described to us. It is only casually referred to as a “sculpture thing” or a “kind of installation.” Indeed, we know very little about Evelyn at all. She listens and observes, speaks only when provoked or when spoken to, whereas Adam babbles, brimming over with words, words that are often lost on Evelyn, who apparently has no cultural knowledge of literature at all. (Even to the point where she misses a Henry Higgins reference, which is a grand irony that she fails to make the connection in spite of constructing her own Pygmalion-like project.) Early in the narrative, Adam notes, “I don’t know anything about you.” Evelyn shoots back, “Yes, you do.” Adam responds, “No, not really.” And Evelyn then proceeds to derail the conversation into casual, surface details like favorite colors or foods. A hint for a careful reader to recognize that Evelyn herself is merely dwelling on the surface of things, the shape of them.

But the first viewing is a mindfuck. I remember this revelation being shocking and cruel when I first saw this film in 2003. I knew it was adapted from a play, but I hadn’t yet seen that play – I wouldn’t for a couple of years until my sister-in-law invited us to a production of it at USC. And at that production, there were people in the room who were encountering the narrative for the first time. There were audible gasps at the moment that Evelyn unveils Adam’s before/after photos during her presentation. I don’t recall this happening in the movie theatre, but I also don’t remember where I saw this film for the first time, or who I was with. I’m assuming it was Marcus. And I’m assuming it was in downtown Berkeley. But it could have been Los Angeles. Much like the original text of the play, it doesn’t really matter where it takes place because The Shape of Things is about Big Philosophical Questions, not a specific historical or social context. On the DVD, LaBute comments on the film being set in Southern California and suggests that the film takes on a different culturally specific valence because of the image-obsessed culture of SoCal. That’s nice, Neil, really. I want to buy it. But they never leave the isolated college campus setting, so I don’t think this holds as much weight as what LaBute suggests it does. My point is that I don’t remember a specific experience that made me like this film 10 years ago. I have no sentimental attachment to it or anything surrounding it. But it stuck with me. It was smart. Brutal. Ambiguous. The kind of story you don’t often see made into a movie. If anything, LaBute’s DVD commentary track does rightly point out that there is a difference between theatre and film: they’re both dishonest mediums, but one of them seems inherently more so. LaBute’s theatre work is horrifying. He writes about people at their most brutal and cruel, doing and saying horrible things. (And not horror movie horrible. Just emotionally awful.) This is not something that sells in the cinema, but it’s something that you can do in theatre. Theatre audiences want that challenge. They want to walk into a space and be changed by art. That’s catharsis. That’s the point of it all. Cinema audiences, especially those who adhere to the stuff that comes out of the studio system, want to be entertained. They’re surface with no depth. Independent cinema changes this, of course. And The Shape of Things was one of those little indies around the turn of the millennium that presented its audience with the kind of challenges theatre provoked.

The Shape of Things asks us to think about what constitutes art from its opening scene, when Evelyn and Adam have their Meet Cute at the museum where she threatens to deface a classical statue in protest of its censorship. The statue was a marble nude of God, which had, at some later point in time, had a giant fig leaf placed over its genitals because people objected to “the shape of his thing,” as Evelyn says. It was obscene for God to have a penis, even if man was created in his image. Evelyn wants to spray paint a dick on the statue in protest, to restore it, in part to the “truth” of what it was supposed to be. She doesn’t like art that isn’t true, she proclaims. The addition of the leaf makes this art false in her eyes. Later, she gets in an argument with Adam’s conservative friends Jenny and Phillip who insist that the added spray paint penis was merely obscenity and not art at all. Jenny calls it pornography, but Evelyn protests: “Pornography is meant to titillate. To excite you. You saw a picture of what happened. Did it excite you?” Phillip calls it graffiti, where Evelyn suggests that it was meant to be a statement, a manifesto. “I don’t think a person’s dick can be a manifesto,” Phillip says.  “You can write a manifesto on your thing, but your thing can’t be one.” What these discussions point to in a larger sense is that art matters because it is public. To place an object in a museum is to submit it for public discussion and examination, and anything that may happen to that object then becomes a public concern. This means, ultimately, that it is not the artist, but the public that decides what art is, what pornography is, and what is/isn’t appropriate for public consumption. Evelyn, the artist, of course critiques this notion and insists that meaning lies in the intentions of the artist…yet the presentation of her work, offered without comment or critique regarding her intentions or vision for the project also releases the work of making meaning to the public. By not stating her intentions, either when she defaces the statue, or when she effaces/refaces Adam throughout the course of the film, she offers her art for critique and interpretation by her public. Thus, Jenny and Phillip fail to see it as art, and instead interpret it as cruelty. Adam, then, is left without a way to make sense of what has happened to him. All he knows for sure is that She Loves Me Not, the human sculpture she has made out of him, is not art. “Don’t fool yourself and think that this is art,” he insists. “It’s a sick fucking joke, but it’s not art.”

The problem of where one should locate meaning in art is also a conversation about how fit bodies themselves are for public consumption. Adam and his conservative friends squirm at the thought of public displays of affection, thinking that sex should be a private matter to happen behind closed doors. Bodies, too, should be shrouded in clothing. Phillip and Jenny are always costumed in long sleeves and long pants. Adam begins the film in baggy clothes, which on the one hand communicates his lack of care about his appearance, but also totally obscures his physical body. Bodies are to be hidden in their world, unseen. Not so for Evelyn, a woman willing to spray paint so-called private parts on the public body of a statue in a museum. She begins by filming herself and Adam having sex, an action she assures him won’t be seen by anyone, but is simply for their own purposes, and then suggesting on several occasions that they not only partake in public displays of affection, but also have sex in public restrooms. Evelyn’s view of the body is of one that exists in public, and should do so in a way that is not false or censored. She and Adam have their first “real fight” about his response to a performance art piece in which the artist painted with her tampon. Adam recoils by calling the piece “nasty” and “private.” “It felt like something I shouldn’t be seeing,” he says. “But she allowed you to!” Evelyn shoots back, in defense of public display. If the statue in the museum is art, so too is any body in public view.

Hence, for Evelyn, moralists really do have no place in an art gallery. Nor do they have a place in the world. For her, art is constantly public facing, and shouldn’t be understood in terms of right and wrong, only in terms of artistic merit and intention. Yet, as I mentioned before, Evelyn’s ideas about merit and intention are tempered by her willingness to make art public. Hence why one of the most poignant things I noticed in this re-viewing of the film is the way that Rachel Weisz plays Evelyn and Adam’s final scene together in the gallery with a slight bit of what might be remorse for her actions. Her intentions to make art are clearly at odds with the public reception of them, as Adam is both her subject and her public, and this creates a conflict for her own understanding of her work and the nature of art itself. It’s nice to see this change, signified by a downturned glance and a glimmer in the eye, of a character we have come to know only as somewhat cold and sociopathic, even in her approach to intimacy.

I approached this review through Evelyn’s eyes because she’s one of the most interesting female roles in contemporary theatre. She has to play what can be understood as cruelty with the most rational honesty, and I find that a great challenge and craft exercise. Adam, on the other hand, simply has to be loveable – something which is not at all a challenge for Paul Rudd, who might be one of the most loveable actors on the planet. Because Adam is so loveable, it’s easy for the audience to side with him and read Evelyn’s thesis as theatre of cruelty, to brand it “not art” and be done with it. But Evelyn herself shows us that art isn’t clearly defined, and even the most honest artistic intentions may not be read as intended by the public, especially where bodies are concerned.

“Stop being so morbid,” she says to Adam at the cosmetic surgeon’s office. “It’s just flesh.” But we all know it’s more than that. It’s art.

Free-Floating Thoughts

I know this project is supposed to be a comparison of how I viewed this film ten years ago versus how I view it now, but I don’t remember what I thought about this ten years ago. I only know that it stuck with me. And that I probably hadn’t thought about it this much since then. Although now I think I might teach the play this fall.

Speaking of public bodies: in 2003, I saw actor Frederick Weller’s penis on Broadway as he played racist MLB pitcher Shane Mungett in Take Me Out.

Evelyn on scars: ““They’re like rings on a tree. They signify experience. They make us unique.”

Filmed at CSU Channel Islands, just about 45 minutes south from my alma mater, UC Santa Barbara. CSUCI is beautiful, but famously was once a state mental institution. UCSB is beautiful and was never a state mental institution. Take that, CSUCI.

Paul Rudd’s prosthetic nose at the beginning of the film is very endearing, for some reason.

Do we need to talk about why they’re Adam and Evelyn, or does the apple on her T-shirt in the art gallery make that apparent enough?

I really enjoy the Meet Cute conversation Adam and Evelyn have at the art gallery about how he once helped her at the video store. It speaks to my former video store employee heart, and makes me sad that no one gets to have that conversation anymore, really.

The film’s opening credits list the actors as “actor Paul Rudd” and “actress Gretchen Mol” as they would for any other person on the technical side of the film. I like this because it equalizes the actors with the rest of the crew (by attaching their name to the role they fulfill, rather than letting us assume actors are more important than set designers or the like). But I also like it because it points out the artifice of performance, which the film’s narrative also does.

The sight of Paul Rudd on a playground rocking horse is something everyone should see once in their lives. Truly.

Ten Years Ago: Down With Love

Stevi Costa is doing three re-views over two weeks. Today, it’s a 2,000-word Ewan McGregor squeefest on Down With Love.

This week, you’ll get two reviews from me. One of them will be an intellectual contemplation about the body, art, and performance. One of them will be a fangirl lovefest dedicated to Ewan McGregor. This review is the latter.

In the early days of our courtship, the editor of this website and I watched a lot of movies together. The summer of 2003, right before I went off to college, was a time rife with this kind of activity. We’d spend all day inside a darkened theater together if we could, and we often did. This means, of course, that we saw all kinds of movies – from smart independent dramas to tentpole summer blockbusters to strange little gems like Peyton Reed’s homage to broad 1960s sex comedies, Down with Love.

Reed’s film is a highly silly tribute to a genre of film that is itself highly silly. Plausability means nothing in the world of the sex comedy. The only true currency in that high gloss world is double entendre, broad jokes laid on so thick that modern audiences can’t really laugh at them, and complicated plot twists that place characters in unusual situations. In Down with Love, Barbara Novak writes a little pink book with some underlying early feminist ideas about love and romance that, through clever marketing, changes the way that women relate to men in 1962. Barbara’s book suggests that women can only gain equality to men if they take love out of the equation, which means, of course, that they can then have sex the way men do, “à la carte.” Barbara and her editor, Vicky (played by the phenomenal Sarah Paulson), want to boost sales of their book by getting a feature story in Know magazine penned by its star journalist, Catcher Block, “ladies’ man, man’s man, man about town”(played by the utterly charming, boyishly handsome Ewan McGregor). But Catch isn’t interested, of course, in any lady who presents herself as being “down with love,” which results in a series of missed meetings involving the ladies in spectacular outfit changes, and Catch phoning in to cancel with a series of double entendres about dogs-which-are-really-stewardesses. (Sample dialogue: Catch, while nuzzling a French stewardess at a Yankee’s game: “I’m at the park with my little French poodle and, well, she simply isn’t ready to go in yet.” Barbara: “A piece of advice from the farm girl to the city boy: If you stick a twig in her bottom she’ll remember why she went out with you in the first place.”) Barbara’s book eventually takes off due to some clever marketing by Vicky, and Catch soon realizes that Barbara is not the spinster librarian he thought she was. She’s actually a pretty woman, and he devises a plan to expose her as a fraud by getting her to fall in love with him. This means that he spends most of the film pretending to be an astronaut named Zip Martin who speaks in a flat Southern drawl . . . which I personally find pretty irresistible coming out of McGregor’s mouth. Eventually, Catch is caught in his lie, but not before really falling in love with Barbara and devising another, smaller, more heartfelt plan to get back in her good graces. Happy endings ensue. Barbara and Catch take a helicopter to Vegas to get hitched.

The plot and the jokes in Down with Love are obviously silly and over the top, but they are a perfect reiteration of the tone of the 1960s sex comedies starring Rock Hudson and Doris Day that this film strives to replicate. And the adherence to such an odd American film genre was one of the things I appreciated most about Down with Love when I saw it in 2003. My love for mid-century Americana clearly runs deep. It does, however, take a certain caliber of actor to really pull off a film this odd, and Peyton Reed nailed it by casting David Hyde Pierce and Sarah Paulson as the secondary leads, Catch and Barbara’s editors, Peter and Vicky, who also eventually pair up, in spite of Vicky’s suspicions that Peter is a closeted homosexual desperately in love with Catcher Block (a conclusion she draws because Catch and Peter have switched apartments to better seduce their romantic pairings). “So what?” she exclaims. “You’re a homosexual in love with Catcher Block. That’s no reason we can’t be married!” Paulson and Pierce are actor’s actors. They understand what it means to play old-style comedy because they take the jokes seriously. They commit to these roles, without throwing us knowing postmodern winks and smiles that let us know they’re in on the joke, and that’s what makes them work. Each of their scenes together are highlights of the film, and I find a special joy in watching two openly gay actors play a couple whose romance plot involves one party willing to be the other’s beard.

McGregor is also perfectly cast. He also understands how to play the dialogue with the right mid-century cadence (helped, in fact, by his Scottish accent . . . and his later employment of his flat Southern drawl that turns me into a puddle of lady goo whenever I hear it). McGregor gets to balance playing the jokes with a knowing smile and taking them seriously, and both strategies work because he’s never winking at us when he pulls away from seriousness – he’s winking at his scene partner, who he usually isn’t in the same scene with. McGregor has a great double entendre scene about sock garters with David Hyde Pierce where their conversation is overheard by a secretary and misinterpreted as being about the amazing stay up power of Catch’s cock (a truly amazing power of McGregor’s, which you’d know if you’ve seen any number of his brooding independent films…I recommend The Pillow Book!). Pierce and McGregor play the scene internally, totally straight. But in other scenes where he evades Barbara with dog-stewardess jokes or a telephone split screen scene where Catch and Barbara work out while planning a date in a number of mock sexual positions, the sexually charged word play is less subtle and delivered knowingly to his scene partner. That knowing delivery still reads as commitment for Catch because we know he’s playing Barbara, so a little extra “play” in his line readings feels real and serious to us. It works.

The cast member who works less well for me is Zellwegger. She, like McGregor, was having a moment in the early 2000s, so we saw a lot of her between 2000-2006. In retrospect, I now feel she is mostly miscast. Here is one of those instances. It’s not for lack of trying on her part. She can wrap her mouth around most of the dialogue, but she doesn’t seem to understand the spirit of midcentury sex comedies. Her ability to sell the concept fades in and out. It feels like she doesn’t know what movie she’s in. Furthermore, she just doesn’t look right. Her makeup isn’t historically accurate, and that really irks me because everyone else in the film looks like 1962. Her hair isn’t a hairpiece, and seems too flat in a world of bi-weekly salon appointments and hairspray. This is very obvious compared to the beautiful fall Sarah Paulson is rocking as Vicky. Finally, she simply doesn’t look like anyone you’d see in a 1960s movie. Zellwegger may be beautiful, and has a special Texas country charm that was popular when Kelly Clarkson won American Idol, but she isn’t 1960s beautiful. Even 10 years later, I’d still keep the rest of the cast. I still think Pierce and Paulson and McGregor would look right in these roles. But Zellwegger I’d replace immediately. Amy Adams or Isla Fisher are better choices. Or even Brittany Snow.  Darling little Gretchen Mol. Any secretary you see in the background on Mad Men. Just…anyone.

Speaking of Mad Men, Down with Love didn’t do well in 2003. The time was not right for a midcentury sex comedy, but, oh! Had Peyton Reed just waited! Had he waited four years for Don Draper to brood in an office, I think the world would have been more receptive to Down with Love. Don Draper ushers inRevolutionary Road, The Master, Howl, and On the Road in cinemas, and a series of failed midcentury setpieces on TV like Pan-Am. Being deeply immersed in genre and the 1960s wasn’t of cultural interest to us in the early millennium, and I’m not sure why. The music in Down with Love is composed by Hairspray’s Marc Shaiman, which hit Broadway the summer prior to Down with Love’s release. Hairspray, a 1960s musical comedy, does set the stage for a return to 1960s culture, but it doesn’t become a Zac Efron movie until 2007. Broadway, while I love it, and while it certainly features heavily into the narrative of Down with Love, doesn’t have the global cultural capital that film and television do. Broadway’s Hairspray didn’t set the midcentury momentum, and so Shaiman’s Broadway success also fails allow Down with Love to ride that wave. Maybe after the film version of Hairspray was released the film would have had more success. It could have cashed in on that and Mad Men. But in 2003, it was a flop. An underrated and unseen gem.

I promised at the top of this review that there would be a significant portion of it dedicated to some fangirly squealing about Ewan McGregor. I managed to collect myself for the above and compliment his acting enough to convince you how well suited he is for the role of Catcher Block, now let me unravel a little bit and share with you the things that actually go on in my head when I watch this film:

WHY ARE YOU SO HANDSOME, EWAN MCGREGOR? Your teeth are so white!

I just…I just can’t…I can’t even look at Ewan McGregor in most of this movie. The gingham jacket…the broad Southern accent…The GODDAMN GLASSES…I just turn into an incoherent puddle of lady goo.

I AM DYING I’M JUST FUCKING DYING AT EWAN IN THIS BROADWAY MONTAGE THE BEATNIK TURTLENECK AND PROFESSOR 20-SOMETHING JACKET THE POLO AND JACKET COMBO AT THE BALLPARK THE FUCKING HIPSTER BEATNIK TWIST OUTFIT I AM DEAD I AM NO LONGER A PERSON

I shit you not, people. Those are my actual notes. The film should be retitled, “Ewan McGregor in a Series of Outfits That Stevi Finds Increasingly Attractive.” No matter how silly this film is, or how much I’ve grown to hate Rene Zellwegger, Down with Love will always work for me because it takes two things I love and sticks them together: great midcentury clothing and Ewan McGregor. He’s too, too perfect as a ladies’ man, man’s man, man about town because given how fucking gorgeous he is throughout this entire film, I can’t imagine a situation in which a human being wouldn’t want to sleep with him. Especially in those outfits! I’d happily be his little English foxhound or French poodle or Swedish laphound or any other bitch he wanted me to be. And he wouldn’t even have to concoct a series of schemes to get me to do so.

A Final Thought:

The scheming bachelor pattern established by Catcher Block in this film did make me think of another scheming bachelor in pop culture, and forced me to ask this existential question: would Barney Stinson even exist without Catcher Block and the 1960s sex comedy? Discuss.

Ten Years Ago: Spellbound

Over the last ten years, Stevi Costa has gone from undergraduate to PhD candidate/graduate teaching assistant. How has this changed her opinion on the spelling bee documentary Spellbound and her understanding of socio-economic inequality, Benedict Anderson, and musical robots?

In 2003, I was a first year college student at UC Santa Barbara. Arts & Lectures put together a lot of free programming to keep students in our relatively isolated (but super beautiful because it was literally built on a mesa overlooking the beach) campus from falling further into our stereotype of being the University of Casual Sex and Booze. And it was at an Arts & Lectures sponsored event that I initially saw Spellbound, a documentary about kids who just really want to win the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee.

I reviewed Spellbound this week because I recalled it being a riveting documentary. I admittedly don’t watch many documentaries. I’m more of a narrative fiction kind of girl. Even though I read a lot more non-fiction now than I did as an undergrad (particular favorites: science writing, food writing, rock and roll journalism), I still don’t seek out documentary features. My limit for non-fiction seems to be in short bursts: an hour at a time, maximum, reading on public transportation or watching an hour-long special on rare diseases. As I sat down to watch Spellbound again, I struggled to remember what made this film so magical to me ten years ago, the thing that got me excited to watch it again. Maybe it was the act of feeling really grown up by choosing to go to a documentary instead of seeking out casual sex and booze on Del Playa Drive. Maybe it was because the film was introduced by the undergraduate programming director, a nice Jewish boy with sleepy eyes, a Beatles-esque mop of dark hair, and a wry voice that made my roommate pine for him from that day forward. (Reader, she married him.) Or maybe it was because in my first quarter of college I hadn’t had my love of spelling (and subsequently ability to do so well) ruined by the discipline of linguistics yet.

Whatever it was, Spellbound did not have the same magic to me on this re-viewing. There’s nothing interesting about the way in which this film is made, and the story it tells is fairly simple, especially in comparison to the absolutely batshit world of pro-Scrabble tournaments revealed in the later (and totally unrelated) documentary Word Wars. But while Spellbound may have a very low rewatchability factor, it was interested to watch this film ten years later after having made the transition from student to teacher. In a very quiet and unassuming way (antithetical to the personality-driven documentaries of Morgan Spurlock and Michael Moore), Spellbound subtly comments on the state of education in the United States in 1999, and points out the spelling bee’s role in an American tradition of rewarding hard work as a form of social intelligence.

Our subjects are eight 8th graders from various ethnic, geographical, and socio-economic backgrounds. Let’s meet them:

Angela: Her parents emigrated from Mexico illegally to give their children better educational opportunities in the U.S. Her father paid a coyote to bring his family to the U.S. when Angela was just a baby. She and her family live on a ranch in Texas, where her father and older brother are employed. The ranch is owned by some very old white people, who are ever so casually racist. They wonder how Angela learned to speak English so good when her parents only speak Spanish. When these folks were introduced, I turned to my husband and said, “These are my people.” They dress and speak exactly like my relatives in Missouri. Right down to the denim on denim cowperson attire.

Nupur: Nupur is Indian-American and lives with her family in Tampa, Florida. Her little brother owns a really cool inflatable Star Wars chair. Her house seems nice and her bedroom has a view of the ocean. Her mother and father like to help her study for Bees by reading the dictionary with her. It seems like the only time they spend together, as every other time we see Nupur she is alone in her room playing her violin. We don’t know what Nupur’s parents do, but they certainly don’t seem pushy about any of her activities. They seem like a nice middle-class family. Nupur’s mother notes that ever since Nupur was two, she loved to say big words – even if she had no idea what they meant. “She would always say, ‘I have no opportunities!’ even though at two she didn’t know what an opportunity was,” her mother says.Ted: Ted entered the Spelling Bee in his Mississippi middle school at the prompting of his teacher. He had never done it before, but he won. And he kept winning enough local and regional Bees to qualify for the Scripps Howard. Ted’s family lives on a couple acres of property. His father is a local educator, and he and his wife seem a bit worried that Ted doesn’t really have much interest in school or after school activities and just wants to come home and shoot arrows or make amateur explosives. His mother is worried that his interests will land him on the wrong side of the law. His father thinks he should join the Marines to learn some discipline. His family raises peacocks, which makes me think that they are the most awesome people in all of Rolla, Mississippi. We see some shots of Rolla, Mississippi in Ted’s introductory package and it appears to be a bit run down, an old factory town that no longer manufactures anything.

Emily: From somewhere in Connecticut, Emily is clearly our most affluent subject. This is the 3rd and final year that she’ll compete in the Bee, having qualified for the National Bee the prior two years of her middle school experience. She speaks of being very disappointed that her au pair would not be able to join her family on the trip to this year’s Bee. “But the au pair is a member of our family,” she insists. Emily talks about her study habits over a montage of her riding horses and practicing polo. She knows a lot of words, but doesn’t like to use them a lot in conversation because she is “worried about sounding too smart.”

Ashley: She is African American and lives in D.C. She will not have to travel far for the National Bee. Her mother mentions that it is hard to juggle going to Bees with Ashley and working multiple jobs. Ashley does not practice spelling at home, but stays after school and works with her teacher by playing spelling games with fill-in-the-blanks and Scrabble tiles. Ashley seems aware that she is on the lower end of the socio-economic scale. When we first meet her, she remarks that she sees her life like a movie because she experiences trials and tribulations and then overcomes them. She is like a tiny, living Oprah’s Book Club selection.

Neil: Neil is a pretty laid back dude who lives with a super-intense Indian father. Neil’s sister tells us that Neil is an athlete, and that the mix of people you find at Spelling Bees was one of the things she liked about them when she was competing. Neil does not seem to care much about the Bee. We never really hear his thoughts or feelings about it, but we sure hear a lot from his dad. His father describes to us a complex regimen he uses when he and Neil practice spelling together. He is the kind of person who uses the word “we” but really means “I.” Neil’s dad also shows us the giant house he and his brother built in Orange County. It’s opulent. There’s a lot of custom marble. It also has a view of the ocean. Neil’s dad remarks that all things are possible in America. “There is no way you can fail in this country,” he says. “There is one guarantee: if you work hard, you’ll make it.”

April: April lives in what I think is New Hampshire. Her house seems like it’s semi-rural. It’s got a big yard, apple trees, and a swing. Her parents are older. They love puns, particularly bee-related ones. She tells us her parents remind her of Archie & Edith Bunker. I like her immediately because she clearly watches TV Land. April loves studying for spelling bees. She says that she studies for 8-9 hours a day when she doesn’t have school. Her teachers supply that even at school, whenever there’s a break between classes or activities or even between plays on the softball field, April breaks out her notecards and studies words. She gets teased for this.

Harry: The documentarians obviously saved the best kid for last. Harry is an adorable weirdo. He’s spazzy, chatty, smart, and utterly charming in his weirdness. He will, on occasion, present perfectly normal thoughts to us in strange voices, like that of a musical robot, simply to amuse himself. I am attracted to his weirdness and overcome with a desire to adopt him and hug him to my bosom. I proclaim my love for this marvelous child out loud. “That kid is me,” my husband says. Obviously, this is fate. We later learn that Harry lives in New Jersey and is Jewish. It is apparent to me that he likes spelling bees because it gives him a way to focus his OCD and ADHD into something productive.

After meeting these kids, the documentary moves straight to the drama of the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee in which these eight children, along with some 239 others, compete over two days to win prize money, a trophy, and bragging rights for their parents. One by one, we watch anonymous children get buzzed out for missing words, and among them, we see our eight documentary subjects eventually fail. It’s sad every time a speller gets buzzed out, because you know how hard they’ve worked and how much they’ve studied to compete, but there’s also something that seems unfair at times about the way the Spelling Bee is designed to be a competition. There are many things you can do to learn how to spell: study phonetic combinations, languages of origin, use context to figure out which spelling of homonyms might be appropriate, etc. But ultimately in the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee, all of that strategy comes down to absolute chance. We can’t all be the kid who gets to spell “chivalry.” Some of the kids are going to have to spell “ichthyosis.”

But what I now realize as an educator that I didn’t realize as a student is how much those chances can vary based on a student’s socio-economic background. It seems to be no coincidence to me that the first three spellers from our pool of documentary subjects eliminated from the National Bee are Ted, Angela, and Ashley: the lower middle-class white farm kid from a decaying factory town, the Mexican-American girl whose Anglo employers can’t figure out how she learned to speak English at all, and our only African-American subject from a single-parent, multi-job home. Education, or the idea of it, doesn’t seem as important to Ted’s family (in spite of the fact that his father is a school administrator) or in Ashley’s. Ted’s family cares only that their son stays out of jail. Ashley’s mother has to work too hard to support her to be able to spend time studying with her. These facts point to an economic reality in which surviving (whether that’s eating or staying on the good side of the law) is more important than advancement. Angela’s family speaks of dreams of advancement, but it’s implied that the language barrier between her parents and their Anglo employers stymies that. Angela, by spelling well in her second language, makes her family proud just by making it to the National Bee. Her father watches her get eliminated with a smile on his face. He does not know what is being said or spelled. The educational background of all three of these children make their chances of performing well in the National Bee markedly lower than that of their competitors from higher socio-economic backgrounds, with parents who have enough free time to study with them or the money to afford multiple books, dictionaries, au pairs, polo practice, and, of course, the cost of the trip to D.C. itself.

The Bee operates on the assumption that spelling words used in English correctly is a hallmark of intelligence, and that learning to spell well in English somehow makes you more American. Indeed, all local and regional spelling bees are sponsored by local newspapers, cementing journalism as the bastion of language use, standards, and correctness. We look to journalism not simply for news, but to tell us how to speak and write properly. (Which is itself an insane notion as newspaper journalism warps English grammar and syntax in the name of reducing space on a consistent and regular basis.) This documentary depicts a great amount of buy-in to this notion, and perhaps provides an answer of a sort to the question posed by Angela’s parents’ employers. How did Angela get so good at English when her parents only speak Spanish? The answer lies in an immersion in the media of her new culture: reading in English, writing in English in school, hearing English on TV, and so on. This, too, is true of Ashley’s affinity for spelling. It has nothing to do with her parents, and everything to do with immersive reading and writing facilitated by print media she receives at school. This lends credence to Benedict Anderson’s notion that nationhood is imagined through literature and national print languages, as well as Michael Warner’s understanding of a diffusion of letters. But the documentary also points to how this idealized form of nation-building through the American tradition of the spelling bee is hindered by actual socio-economic inequality within the nation. The moneyed families from India can move up the social ladder through education successfully because they have the economic means to do so: lower-class domestic students and children of working-class immigrants cannot.

Nupur wins, by the way. Her winning word is ‘logorrhea’: “excessive and often incoherent talkativeness or wordiness.” An apt way to wrap up a spelling bee.

Ten Years Ago: A Mighty Wind

Just in time for Christopher Guest’s upcoming HBO series “Family Tree,” here’s Bri Lafond‘s brand new re-view of Guest’s 2003 folk music mockumentary.

 

 

A Mighty Wind is the third and (as of this writing) final mockumentary directed by Christopher Guest, the man who brought you Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show. Following the formula of Guest’s previous films, an unseen documentary crew follows a group of performers (or dogs and their handlers, in the case of Best in Show) in the days leading up to a big, potentially life-changing show. The culminating show in A Mighty Wind is a tribute to the late Irving Steinbloom, a folk music producer. Three of Irving’s acts reunite at New York’s Town Hall to pay homage: The New Main Street Singers, The Folksmen, and Mitch & Mickey.

A Mighty Wind features many of Guest’s usual cast of players, and also musically reunites Guest with Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, his fellow bandmates from the eponymous This Is Spinal Tap (1984). The Folksmen—Guest, McKean, and Shearer—are actually twice reunited, The Folksmen being a faux folk (fauxk?) group that first appeared in a Saturday Night Live sketch in the mid-1980s.

At the center of the nine-member New Main Street Singers are Terry and Laurie Bohner (John Michael Higgins and Jane Lynch), a married couple who worship “an unconventional deity”: color, which they believe to be “saturated energy.” Also featured is Sissy Knox (Parker Posey), daughter of one of the original Main Street Singers and a former street urchin. The group’s sleazy agent, Mike LaFontaine (Fred Willard), keeps the Singers booked at theme parks and discount cruises, making them currently the most high-profile of the collected acts.

Then there’s Mitch (Eugene Levy) and Mickey (Catherine O’Hara), the sweethearts of the 1960s folks scene with their hit song “A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow,” punctuated by an actual kiss in each performance. The divorced couple haven’t seen each other in years, and Mitch has spent most of those intervening years institutionalized.

Though many of the same actors appear and Guest generally follows the same thematic formula that worked so well in Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show, there’s something lacking in A Mighty Wind: the movie just isn’t as funny or endearing as Guest’s other films. Particularly in Best in Show, Guest proved himself adept at juggling a large cast of characters and giving the audience an ample glimpse into multiple characters’ lives. Here, those glimpses are all too brief, giving the jokes a forced feeling. For example, Terry and Laurie Bohner identifying themselves as WINCs—Witches in Nature’s Colors—and the couple of cutaway scenes in which we see them worshipping colors feel like cheap sight gags as opposed to legitimate character development.

This seeming inability to scratch beneath the surface of these characters causes the film to drag. There is scene after scene of the various groups rehearsing, but nothing seems to really happen. The only real attempt at building tension is the question of whether or not Mitch will be able to perform, but this conflict is more told than shown: we see Mitch and Mickey rehearsing well together, then we’re told Mitch has locked himself in his hotel room, then he’s been talked out of the room in the next scene.

A Mighty Wind is by no means a bad movie, but it is a rather slight movie that’s less about the comedy and more about the music. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but there’s little story here to justify a full-length movie as opposed to putting together something more conducive to showcasing the music.

Free-Floating Thoughts

The detailed mythology of the faux folk music scene that is laid out early in the film is impressive, but I can’t help but think that the audience is missing out on a better story than the one we’re about to receive.

Mickey’s husband, Leonard Crabbe, is another figure with many quirks in search of a real character. He’s a “model train enthusiast” who has included a brothel in his model village and is in “the bladder management industry.”

The endless rehearsal scenes get old fast, but I’d say the worst offenders are The Folksmen. Their scenes play out just like music rehearsals with questions of key and pitch and blah-blah-blah.

Fred Willard’s Mike LaFontaine is very similar to the character he played in Best in Show, but there’s something mean-spirited about his character here that makes the performance fall short. Particularly crass is a swingers joke he tells at the small awards ceremony hosted by the deputy mayor: “Have you met my wife? Your honor!”

Ed Begley, Jr.’s character is another head-scratcher. He plays Lars Olfen, the head of the Public Broadcast Network who will be broadcasting the reunion show. Lars tells us he had a minor hit with his garage band back in Sweden called “How’s it Hangin’ Grandma.” He also launches into a long string of Yiddish phrases. Why this ostensibly Swedish man makes with all the Yiddish is beyond me: it’s never explained.

One of my favorite lines in the movie is a bit of a throwaway. The Folksmen are on their way to the New York hotel they’ll be staying at and find themselves lost. Guest tells his bandmates that he has a map, but he doesn’t have it with him. McKean asks—in his classic McKean straight-faced sarcastic way–if he plans on “studying the map later, academically?”

Jennifer Coolidge and Larry Miller appear as Public Relations specialists for about five minutes of collective screen time. This didn’t stop marketing from playing up Coolidge and Miller in the film’s trailer. Coolidge sports an inscrutable accent and a curly brown wig. Miller does his patented Miller squint and schtick.

Michael Hitchcock’s theater manager character is another one that falls a bit flat. His interactions with Bob Balaban’s clueless Jonathan Steinbloom have a bit of awkward humor to them, but it seems they didn’t know what to do with the character, so he ends up smacking Steinbloom over the head then disappearing from the movie.

The music isn’t bad at all, particularly considering folk music isn’t exactly my scene. I’d say The Folksmen are the most talented, but, then again, they have had the most practice at it.

The finale of the show is a performance of “A Mighty Wind” which ends with the line “it’s blowin’ you and me.” A cheap laugh tacked onto the otherwise played straight musical performances.

Ten Years Ago: Better Luck Tomorrow

For his second re-view for 10YA, Jolon Buchbinder takes another look at Justin Lin’s Better Luck Tomorrow.

WARNING: This review contains spoilers about what happens in the final scene.

In 2003 I went to theSundance Film Festival with my parents. That year we saw mostly documentaries. One of the standout films was Better Luck Tomorrow. It was nice to see a film with almost no pre-festival buzz and no real stars in the cast. The screening was even in one of the smaller theaters. Even the festival didn’t really do that much for the film. After the screening, people loved it and word-of-mouth spread. It was bought by MTV Films and distributed by Paramount.

The film is the story of four friends who are all too smart for their own good. They are all overachieving high school students, destined for Ivy League colleges and are bored with their lives. They pull scams to get money and then start dealing drugs and also taking them. All the while the main character has a crush on a girl and is trying to woo her despite her tough boyfriend. Tragedy strikes toward the end of the film and all the characters have major decisions to make that will affect the course of their lives.

A major part of the publicity for this movie is that it features an all-Asian cast with many of them unknowns or even first time actors. The cast is surprisingly strong especially the lead, Perry Shen, and Sung Kang as the older brother of Shen’s best friend. The other nice thing about the film is that for a low-budget movie with a budget of just $250,000, it looks really good. The director Justin Lin, who would go on to direct a number of films in the Fast and the Furious franchise, really knows how to use a camera and show off the style that he later brought into his other films.

Having only seen the film the one time at the Sundance screening, I didn’t really remember a lot of scenes. I was struck by how slow the movie is. That’s not a bad thing as it is much more of a character piece than a plot-driven movie. I was also struck by the late arrival of some of the tragic events I remembered, which now kind of feel like filler. I suppose it makes sense as the characters need something to bring them back down from their podium. For most of the film the characters believe they are invincible, getting away with things. Something needed to happen to show them the truth.

Which brings me to the finalscene. When the film was released in theaters, the studio that bought it at Sundance insisted on a change. The final voiceover from the main character is different and it changes the whole tone of the ending. The characters get cocky, and when the tragic event happens, they bury it and still get away with it. By changing the ending and giving the main character some doubt about his future, it changes his character and changes who he was through the entire film. Previously getting away with things and not worrying about the consequences of his actions for the whole film, he is now suddenly worried about the future. It doesn’t make sense.

All that being said the film is very much worth watching. The characters are interesting and not your usual Hollywood teenagers. They do terrible things but are likeable and genuinely feel bad about what they do to other people. The characters are kind of like the ones in the movie Kids but they are smart and know how to get away with what they do. They also know that once they go to college they can get a good job and move on with their lives. It’s not that they don’t care about their future, they don’t care about their present. That is what the final scene is really about.

One final note: Apparently this movie has further connection to the Fast and the Furious franchise. Han, the character played by Sung Kang, appears in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, Fast & Furious, Fast Five, and the upcoming sixth installment. To watch them in chronological order watch The Fast and the Furious, 2 Fast 2 Furious, Better Luck Tomorrow, Fast & Furious, Fast Five and The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.

Ten Years Ago: Phone Booth

Even ten years later, the gaping plot holes and logical inconsistencies of this Joel Schumacher thriller are bugging the hell out of Raffi Nakashian in this week’s re-view.

Pop quiz, hotshot: A phone rings in a booth on a crowded Manhattan street corner. You pick it up and a strange voice tells you that there is a rifle pointed at you and that if you leave the booth, you’ll be shot dead. If you cry out for help, you’ll be shot dead. What do you do? What do you do?

Movie villains come up with the most contrived scenarios to torture their hapless victims, don’t they? This one sounds almost as implausible as a madman strapping a bomb to a bus that can’t slow down; but as complicated and unlikely as his bomb-on-a-bus scenario was, we never had to question why Dennis Hopper bothered to go to all that trouble. He had a very clear reason for torturing Keanu Reeves in Speed. That pesky cop foiled his extortion plans and left him for dead. Wow, I’d be pretty annoyed, too. The bus-bomb was sweet revenge. The faceless shooter in Phone Booth has a mysterious motive, and much of the movie’s hook was simply finding out why this man was trapped in that phone booth. Had he wronged the mysterious shooter in some way? Was he a random target for an unhinged lunatic? I’ll just have to pay twelve dollars adjusted for inflation and find out, thought I.

Like most people that saw the trailer and were drawn in by the premise, I wanted to get to the bottom of this mystery. Even the identity of the man behind the rifle was made to be quite a tease. Who was on the other end of the phone? (“Neat, the guy from 24!” we’d later think, mildly amused.) Much like the best questions posed by the most memorable on-screen mysteries like Lost, Twin Peaks, or Citizen Kane, the answer to those questions are never quite as interesting as the questions themselves. In fact, sometimes they’re an earth-shattering disappointment.

At least “Phone Booth” only takes a merciful 79 minutes to disappoint you. Not 79 MONTHS.

Thankfully, Phone Booth didn’t crush my soul like other dramas I’ve found myself heavily invested in, because it’s hard to get invested in the story in the first place. Everything about the movie just feels “off” from the get-go. It begins with a voice-over reciting statistics about phone booth usage in New York City over a montage of people using phones. This information has nothing to do with the plot of the film, and the narrator is never heard from again. It just seems like the screenwriter felt that a movie called Phone Booth might as well start with some information about phone booths. They’re all going to be extinct in about ten years, the writer thought, this will be our phone booth swan song. Our eulogy to booths containing phones. Next I’ll write a movie called “CRT Monitor,” and it’ll begin with statistics about how flat-screen monitors have become more prevalent over the last few years while usage of cathode ray tube monitors has slowly diminished. Cut to a charming yet narcissistic bastard that uses his old CRT monitor to Skype with a woman that’s not his wife when he gets an incoming call from an anonymous moral vigilante that watches him Skype through his window every day and has just about had enough of his unsuccessful attempts at infidelity and has placed an explosive device in his CRT monitor to scare him into being the loving husband he knows he should be through threat of violent murder.

But that movie hasn’t been written yet, I presume, and Phone Booth shifts its focus from phone booths to our protagonist Stu. He’s a stereotypically sleazy Manhattan suit that spends the first five minutes on screen lying and manipulating people before getting into the phone booth, and then tells a pizza delivery guy who is trying to give him a free, delicious pizza to fuck off. Then he calls him fat. He dials Katie Holmes and tries to cheat on his wife with her. It’s a good thing Colin Farrell has great hair and that Irish charm, otherwise he’d be a pretty damn unlikable character already. What is wrong with you, movie? Why are you trying so hard to alienate me?

Your “hero,” ladies and gentlemen.

Let’s ignore all of the other little details that are strange and off-putting, like the horribly obvious CGI sniper rifle red dots that seem to hover over characters without any regard to their actual position in space, the cringe-inducing attempts at humor with the Malibu’s Most Wanted look-alike in the limousine, and the clunky dialogue. Boy, does it fall flat sometimes. At one point, the sniper lists literally every working television anchor. Have they not heard of the “rule of three”? Things sound better in threes. There are so many instances where characters list things. There are too many to list. Although if I were a character in Phone Booth, believe me, I’d list them.

But these details aren’t what make the film ultimately disappointing. It’s the answer to the riddle that teased us ten years ago: why is Stu trapped in a phone booth with a gun pointed at him? It doesn’t take long to find out. Stu gets a call from his mysterious sniper who berates him about turning away that pizza. After all, he’s going to be in there for a while. This sniper knows very intimate details about Stu’s life, like his name, address, his wife’s workplace, and his attempted-mistress’s phone number. If he knows so much about Stu, he should have known that he wouldn’t eat a pizza in the middle of the day, look at his physique! Stu is obviously a narcissist that watches his diet. Does Panera deliver? They do egg-whites only if you ask for them.

This gunman has been watching Stu, and if he leaves the phone booth, he will be shot. What heinous crimes has he committed to warrant the obsessive attention of a highly trained gunman for weeks on end? This man apparently knows every detail about his life. We as the audience want to know what would drive a man to terrorize him this way. It takes the next hour for us to watch a man with a gun to his head tell his wife that he’s been having impure thoughts.

That’s all. Impure thoughts. He hasn’t actually cheated on his wife. You’d think he’d at least have rounded the bases if he’s gotten a complete stranger mad enough to threaten to kill him. He hasn’t even left home plate! Stu flirts with a girl from his phone booth, and this guy sits in his room and fumes about it. Then we as the audience get to listen to Kiefer Sutherland’s self-satisfied laugh as he makes Stu call the police captain impotent. What did that poor policeman do to deserve that? He seems so nice. Have you ever seen Forest Whitaker upset? He’s like a sad puppy, it’s heartbreaking.

Joking aside, this is really the core failure of this movie. Stu is neither a relatable innocent, nor is he a horrible person. He’s just an asshole. We’re surrounded by assholes every day, but few of us wish death upon them. At the opposite end, our protagonists should at least be somewhat likeable. While I was watching this movie for the second time, I wondered why the sniper didn’t instead torture the pimp that works twenty feet away from the phone booth. Stu has a good job, pays his taxes, is occasionally rude to people, and fantasizes about cheating on his wife. That other guy sells women for sex. If our sniper claims to be on some kind of moral crusade, then he definitely has his priorities out of order. Granted, the pimp eventually gets shot, but only to mess with Stu. What did Stu ever do??

Stu doesn’t deserve to die, but he’s not likeable enough for the audience to want anything good to happen to him either. You end up just kind of feeling sorry for him. To make things worse, the growth he experiences over the course of the movie is because he literally has a gun to his head.

“Be a better person, or I’ll kill you and everyone you love!”

Toward the end of the movie, at the sniper’s behest, Stu is forced to tell his wife that he wanted to sleep with another woman. His wife actually says out loud that she doesn’t care, she just wants him to end his apparent mental breakdown. If his wife doesn’t care, why should we as the audience care? His sins seem so trivial that his own wife didn’t even seem fazed by the information. Did the sniper second guess himself at that point? “Gee, all of this trouble to get him to admit that he was attracted to another woman, and his wife didn’t even seem to give a shit. Maybe she knew all along. Maybe she’s been cheating on him. I didn’t even bother to look into that. What if they’re swingers and she gets off on him sleeping around? I don’t know the details of their relationship on an emotional level, I don’t really know these people at all. I just stare at this phone booth all day. God, what am I doing with my life?”

Not that it matters. There are so many glaring plot holes that it was impossible to suspend disbelief even for its short running time, mainly due to the unbelievable incompetence of the police captain. I can’t fathom why dozens of police officers spend hours surrounding a man inside a transparent box with no visible weapon. He doesn’t have a hostage, he’s apparently just talking on the phone. Why do they set up a perimeter and snipers around him? Just approach him with guns drawn and pull him out of the booth. They just stare at him talking on the phone with their guns pointed at him. Every time there is another intense close-up of Colin Farrell’s face as he pleads with the sniper, I just imagine the police officers silently watching him talk for minutes at a time, waiting for a signal from their captain to approach him. Or does every arrest take place with officers waiting patiently for a suspect to climb into their squad cars of their own accord?

How about the fact that the police captain listens in on Stu’s conversation with the sniper, hears him say “Please don’t hurt my wife,” and continues to casually carry on a conversation with her in the middle of the street? He eventually tells her to get in a car, which he must consider to be sufficient protection against a lunatic sniper that could be in any one of hundreds of windows, but then she’s able to just get in and out of the car at will to listen to Stu’s tearful “I’m a big fat phony” speech at the end.

She narrowly avoided getting cheated on and shot in the head today. Is this her lucky day or what?

It would be pointless and redundant to complain every time something unrealistic happens in a film. I wouldn’t waste my energy discussing how the bus in Speed couldn’t possibly make a jump across that incomplete overpass. My points are about character motivation. Movies are about people. If I can’t understand why a character is doing something, or constantly question why people are behaving unrealistically, then I can’t accept them as real people, and therefore I can’t get invested in the plot. I’ll also point out that any sort of growth that a person experiences in a film are rewarding when that growth occurs naturally, and not because he has a gun to his head. Phone Booth is about strange people with questionable motivation stemming from a high-concept plot that Alfred Hitchcock was too smart to make into a movie forty years ago. Then he died, and the writer found Joel Schumacher to be less picky about what he’d make into a film, and there you have it: Phone Booth, a movie about a man pointing a gun at another man for thinking about cheating on his wife until he stops. It doesn’t sound as interesting when you say it like that, does it?

Ten Years Ago: L’Auberge Espagnole

Max DeCurtins revisits “the fear, the exhilaration, and the sheer fucking awkwardness of being in one’s mid-twenties” with this new look at Cedric Klapisch’s “L’Auberge Espagnole.”

“Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.”—Carl Gustav Jung

So we may describe the unfolding of Xavier, a twenty-something French graduate student in economics who ventures to Barcelona for a year to study for his degree and to secure a governmental job. He leaves behind his steady, if introverted, girlfriend Martine (Audrey Tautou) and his hippie mother—who together form the backbone of his relatively sane life—and plunges headfirst into a situation in which he has to build a new identity for himself. Xavier heads to Barcelona speaking only elementary Spanish, convinced of only one thing: that he has to go, regardless of whether or not he actually intends to work as an economist.

L’Auberge Espagnole expertly captures the fear, the exhilaration, and the sheer fucking awkwardness of being in one’s mid-twenties. When life seems like a pantomime, many situations become fraught with the pronounced fear of fucking up, possibly with real consequences. Crucially, the film does not belabor this point. It makes clear that after living in a new place for some time you come to develop a familiarity with it, as well as a sense of ownership. As a UCSB alumnus, I feel this way about Isla Vista: it’s a shithole, but it’s our shithole, thank you very much. And, as I come up on four years in Boston—the first major city in which I’ve ever lived—I know that I’ve developed a similar feeling about Beantown and my current and former ‘hoods, Brighton and Jamaica Plain. Xavier comes to have this relationship with Barcelona, and while most of us get our first taste of this experience in college, our mid-to-late twenties somehow amplify the effect.L’Auberge Espagnole also emphasizes that, as much as the locale in which you find yourself, the people who form your primary and secondary social circles exercise just as much influence over your sense of identity. I generally think we know this instinctively, but at some point we become self-aware enough that we realize our own conscious power to change our sense of self. In leaving for Barcelona, Xavier begins a search for a new identity, and while he frames the whole experience as a series of events that happened to him (“Tout a commencé là, quand mon avion a décollé”—it all started when my plane took off), he comes to see that he can make deliberate choices that he knows will change his worldview.

Save the extramarital affair between Xavier and Anne-Sophie which, thanks to this being a French film, you know is coming the moment the two exchange hellos, I had completely forgotten almost everything else about this film. Though as it progressed I started to recall other elements of the story, watching this film ten years later nearly felt like seeing it again for the first time, an experience which, with a film of the quality ofL’Auberge Espagnole, felt nothing less than rapturous.

L’Auberge Espagnole is one part Pete Seeger, one part college study abroad brochure, and one part “What Color is Your Parachute?” Without aural or visual reference to little boxes (except, perhaps, the glimpses we get of the offices at the government ministry), the film deftly satirizes bureaucratic life and careerism. I laughed with a sick humor at the overlay of forms that infests the screen when Xavier asks the Erasmus coordinator what he needs to do to complete his file. From the second the first form pops up, you know exactly where this will end. This scene, and the use of the fisheye lens and fast-forwarded action at the beginning of the film, is all it needs to make its point; from there, the focus shifts to Barcelona, perhaps the study abroad archetype par excellence.

About that study abroad brochure: easily among the most attractive elements of the film, the idea of a multinational, polyglot household makes my inner geek swoon. Not so much the squalor (though this is hardly La Bohème), but the kind of fun one could have (and the kind of food one could cook) in such amalgamated domestic arrangements sets every one of my nerd synapses ablaze. I never studied abroad in college, never truly indulged my Francophilia, and now here I find myself, far too entrenched in the concerns of adulthood, regretting it one hundred and twenty percent.

L’Auberge Espagnole also incorporates the thread of Xavier “curing” himself of his sane—and safe—career choice, abandoning economics in order to pursue his childhood dream. Thankfully, the film treads lightly here, too: Xavier’s passion for writing functions as terse bookends to the story of his journey. In an era of suffocating inequality and financially-stretched governments at every level in countries around the world, and especially as a member of a generation that is now painfully reconciling the Clinton-era prosperity of our tween and early teen years with the sober task of forging a new model of adulthood (not even the Gen-X model of adulthood offers a useful framework), I think any mention of the trope of following one’s dream requires particularly expert handling, and this the film does well in a deft, understated manner.

For once, I don’t have much to say about the musical selections that populate the film. I suppose I could comment upon the trope of the “sexy beat” in music as expressed through the film’s presentation of flamenco (the trope being that music cannot be sensual or exciting unless it pulses forth from regular beats—ask someone why he or she likes a particular song and I’ll wager here and now that you’ll hear some mention of dance). Or perhaps I could address the bizarre appearance of Chopin’s famous waltz in C-sharp minor, which every advanced intermediate pianist plays at one time or another. I suppose the work, an exemplar of music that represents a specific class of piano pieces that one plays upon reaching a certain level of skill, could be mapped to Xavier’s attainment of a certain level of self-awareness. The Chopin waltz stands at the threshold of pianistic maturity; after this point, you either go on to work on fully-realized technique and the chefs d’œuvre of keyboard music—Bach fugues, Beethoven and Schubert sonatas, Chopin etudes, and various solo works by Brahms, Schumann, Debussy, and Rachmaninov—or you drop the piano altogether. And if we’re going to care at all about which music of the Western canon is used in film (and I know y’all do), I would have thought that a selection from Ravel’s Rapsodie Espagnole would make for the most fitting match with L’Auberge Espagnole. Spain has always loomed large in the French imagination of the exotic, and Ravel exemplifies this perhaps more than any other French composer. If we’re really going to stretch things, we can point out that Chopin’s C-sharp minor waltz shares some of the internationalism that inhabits the film—a stylized dance of German provenance written by a Polish composer in exile in Paris—but this work in no way conveys the sensuality that portions of Ravel’s Rapsodie Espagnole do. The waltz’s strong rhythmic profile and crystal-clear tonal harmony don’t map to the anxiety and uncertainty that Xavier experiences. Alas, I am not in charge of such decisions. (If I were, there would be an epidemic rash of movies featuring the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.)

I think that part of what makes L’Auberge Espagnole such a compelling film, at least for me, is how well it captures the multiplicity of sensations that accompany the process of becoming highly self-aware, and what it feels like not simply to be self-aware, but to own that self-awareness and use it to make deliberate decisions about one’s life. It’s by no means a comfortable position in which to reside, and it’s one in which I have found myself for the last year and a half, and I want out. Every moment of pleasure must be purchased with an equal moment of pain, as they say, and in the end we can’t say that Xavier really knows how happy and/or how sad he is to know what he now knows, something we witness as he wanders through the streets of what appears to be Montmartre. To adopt words more eloquent than mine (specifically, those of musicologist and noted crank Richard Taruskin): “It is good to know how not to know how much one is knowing.”

Free-Floating Thoughts

Did it surprise anyone else as much as it surprised me that Wendy doesn’t speak any French? My understanding of England’s linguistic situation vis-à-vis the Continent is that despite England’s longstanding rivalry with France, French remains a common, if not prevalent, second language among the English.

Kevin Bishop seems destined to play a brat. Watching his scenes actually made me grossly uncomfortable, precisely because his character really is that crass; had this film been an American production (just bear with me here), you can bet that the things that come out of William’s mouth would have met with withering criticism from American moviegoers.

I love the multilingual “default replies” sheet taped to the wall above the phone. Period.

In an era when LGBT rights and awareness breaks new ground with astonishing speed, L’Auberge Espagnole betrays its age—I think—in its depiction of Xavier receiving sex advice from Isabelle, his lesbian roommate from Belgium. What exactly is going on in this scene? I don’t think I’ve fully parsed this one yet, but I welcome comments from your dedicated 10YA readers expressing your thoughts.

Ten Years Ago: Nowhere in Africa

After taking a well-deserved four-month break from 10YA, Erik Jaccard returns with a second look at the 2003 winner for Best Foreign Language Film as filtered through his own interest in Africa and its portrayal on film.

Nirgendwo in Afrika (Nowhere in Africa)

Adapted for the screen and directed by Caroline Link

Hello again to my 10ya readers. This, the first of nine reviews I have scheduled for 2013, is intended to be something of an anomaly for me insofar as it is being squeezed into a very condensed block of available time: 90 minutes. As in, I literally have 90 minutes—and not a minute more—in which to get this done. Scandalous, I know. Generally I give myself about 900 minutes and my re-views end up totaling something like eight single-spaced pages. As much fun as that undoubtedly is from time to time, it ain’t going to happen here today. So, this is going to be more like a timed test, a written exam, a therapy session, or a brief psychosis. Take your pick.

What is most notable about my recent re-viewing of Caroline Link’s Nowhere in Africa (original titleNirgendwo in Afrika) is that I originally had very little to say about it. I remember watching it on DVD sometime in 2003 and thinking that it was an interesting story of a European family escaping oppression and battling against all odds to stay together in the face of adversity. And I’m sure this is the general idea that the filmmakers had when they set about adapting Stefanie Zweig’s 1998 autobiographical novel of the same name. It’s certainly the easiest and most superficial reading of the material and its presentation, mainly because it fits so cleanly in amongst all the other stories of Africa (mainly white, mainly European) that have made visible splashes in the public consciousness (Sydney Pollock’s Academy Award-winning Out of Africabeing probably the most notable). Because of this, I let Nowhere in Africa slip through my fingers back then, unable as I was to resort to alternative frameworks for understanding the larger dramas it attempts to unfold. The film became for me simply another unproblematic rendering of European history set against an exotic backdrop. I appreciated it for its dramatic content and this seemingly incidental setting, but nothing more.

The colossal difference between my 2003 and 2013 viewings is that, in the interim I have become a scholar of some things African (mostly literature) and a fan of most things African (sports, culture, the occasional political triumph). This has actually made quite a difference in how I view Euro-American treatments of Africa on film, many of which ultimately do nothing more than rehearse a litany of clichés, half-truths, or outright lies about Africa and Africans, relegating the latter to caricatures or, worse, to mute, exotic backdrop for the exploits of white adventurism. In thinking of this briefly, and given his recent passing, it is fitting to revisit the late Chinua Achebe’s famous objection to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous ‘African’ novels in the history of ‘English Literature.’ For the uninitiated, I offer a brief recap:

 

Heart of Darkness, for those who have not read it (or seen Apocalypse Now), is nominally the story of a sailor named Marlow, who voyages to the African jungle (in reality, the fin de siècle Belgian Congo) in the employ of a European ivory trading company. While there he learns of an enigmatic and hugely successful trader named Kurtz, who has taken up station deep in the jungle and has, as the European saying goes, ‘gone native.’ Of course, Heart of Darkness is more than this story; it is also quite clearly an attack on European imperialism, albeit one couched in careful and reserved terms. For Achebe, however, Conrad’s novella offers only an “image of Africa,” and a one-dimensional, stereotypical, and racist one at that. It is “the purveyor of comforting myths” of white superiority, a romantic repetition of the same imperial ideology it seeks to critique. In the text’s purview all of Africa is the dark, bestial flipside to European enlightenment and civility, its people mute, frenzied beasts whose primary role is to either reaffirm European power or, at the very most, prove to Europeans that, deep down, we are all savages. My favorite moment in Achebe’s caustic rebuttal to Conrad and his acolytes occurs when he, speaking of the Marlow-Kurtz drama, asks why nobody has thus far “[seen] the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind.” This criticism, which can be very difficult for a white Westerner to register, is the one easiest to incorporate into a discussion of Euro-American films that take Africa as a setting, simply because it takes a concept we’re all familiar with—props—and asks one to consider what it might feel like to see themselves turned into an degraded instrument for the telling of someone else’s story.

Most ‘African’ films made in Hollywood about Americans or Europeans in Africa tend to rehearse some version of this ideology, relegating Africa and Africans to any of the varieties of the more recent, post-independence stereotypes. It is a land of dictatorship, poverty, disease, chaos, and squalor—the modern man-made catastrophe par excellence—turned to the role of a prop for the development of white heroes, the coming together or falling apart of white couples, or the triumph of European ‘democracy’ (linked, of course, to its ‘European’ origin, without which, we are to understand, it could never have occurred). Thus, since 2003 it has become very, very difficult for me to watch films ‘about’ or set in Africa without measuring them against a very exacting set of criteria which attempts to take all of this into account. In 2013, however, I’m happy to report that I found that film has actually become more, rather than less complex and that this drastically improved my viewing experience the second time round.

Given my time constraint, I’d like to work through my re-view with one major concept in mind: family, and particularly family as a mode of belonging. As most of us know from personal experience, family is one of the many relational poles against which we define ourselves. Even those who attempt this self-definition negatively, against, rather than within their family, or who seek out and find alternative forms of familial belonging, the group still exerts a massive influence on our self-knowledge. What’s more, ‘family’ is a loose word, with flexible connotations. Its tentacles reach beyond the interpersonal and influence larger group identities of which we are a part, be they national, regional, religious, cultural, ‘sub’-cultural, or what have you.

This is perhaps the most obvious conceptual apparatus to reach for when watching the film, mostly because it is closest at hand. Nowhere in Africa tells the story of the Redlich family, German Jews who fled Nazi persecution in 1938 by emigrating to Kenya as political refugees. Torn apart by violence and prejudice in their homeland, the Redlichs spend the greater part of the film attempting to come back together as a family with the help of Africa, whose land and people play the role of surrogate to each at various moments. Like the novel, the film unfolds from the perspective of Regina Redlich (Lea Kurka/Karoline Eckertz), the only child of Walter (Merab Ninidze) and Jettel (Juliane Köhler). For Regina, whose immediate family is her entire world, the move to Kenya is a major upheaval and one that isolates and emphasizes the various shifts that world undergoes. In terms of Regina’s life this means a number of things. One is the multiple fracturing of her immediate family, marital strife between Walter and Jettel, the stability of whose bourgeois roles as husband/man and wife/woman are thrown into doubt by the vagaries of their exile, and most importantly the expansion of her family to include various African figures in relation to whom her identity forms over the course of the film. As she lets us know early on, she never ‘knew’ Germany, and therefore never ‘knew’ herself as German in the same way as her parents. Regina’s self-knowledge instead derives from her incorporation into the much larger familial drama of her life as a Jewish German immigrant on a Kenyan farm in a British colony during World War II. Indeed, one of the more touching sub-narratives of the film as a whole is Regina’s relatively rapid integration into life on the farm, where she quickly and painlessly (as only children can) learns Swahili and rather painlessly incorporates herself into the living culture of the farm and its environs (the scene where she and a native Kenyan child share how awesome it is to warm their feet by standing in a fresh cow pie is particularly amusing—and gross). As a mind still in formation, she retains little in the way of the cultural obstacles that otherwise detain her parents, who think of themselves, to varying degrees, as “European,” “cultured,” “civilized,” and therefore superior to their native Kenyan neighbors, despite their connection through social and political marginality.  For the well-intentioned Redlichs, whose liberal gentleness sets them apart from the belligerent Kenyan settler colonists among whom they take shelter, these neighbors remain ‘family’, but with a difference—being black, African, and apparently ‘uncivilized,’ they stand just a peg or two down the ladder. As an arbiter of the fluid, working definition of ‘family’ then, Regina comes to pose as the progressive foil to her parents’ stubborn resistance to adapt these categories that would otherwise define their relationship to each other and the greater world.

Were the film to focus solely on the disintegrating relationship between Walter and Jettel, it would likely turn into yet another gloomy postwar presentation of European barbarism and debasement, highlighting how savage a couple can be, and how that relationship mimics the barbarity of the society from and within which it arises.  In this, one could easily see a forming and oversimplified duality that would group the adults on the debased side of a Blakean distinction between innocence and experience, where Germany/Europe, adulthood, the future, civilization, even whiteness, were all degraded forms of experience opposed to an idealized innocence to be found in noble Africa. [I want to stop here and recognize that this film, because itdoes make this point—that the experience of Europeans under fascist rule is very similar to that of the native African in his own colonized homeland—accomplishes way more than most. Most would not even stoop to recognize that, as Aimé Césaire put it in Discourse on Colonialism (1950), Nazi barbarism is just industrialized European colonialism applied to white Europeans (and that it is all the more shocking because of this).] Yet, because the narrative is told from Regina’s more hybridized perspective, the film allows us to move back and forth across the opposition between innocence and experience, civilization and savagery, dark and light, dirty and clean, European and African. This is important, because it at least attempts to move us beyond a new stable, static state of affairs (Europeans bad, Africans good, whereas before it was vice versa). The film is very clear in its overturning of the old distinctions, such that most of what happens in Kenya becomes a much saner and more human version of “the horror” playing itself out across Europe (even the ritual slaughter of a goat, while violent, is juxtaposed to the mass slaughter of Jews we do not see, but which we know to be happening). But because she carries with her no prejudices towards either ‘Europe’ or ‘Africa,’ Regina’s maturing perspective is the wisest and most socially progressive. It first recognizes no differences between human beings (in contrast to her parents) only to later appreciate those differences as constitutive components of a greater whole. One would think that the reason she is able to recognize them as such is because they are constitutive components of her own whole, her own perspective, and her own expanding (and functional) definition of what it means to be a family.

In fact, this time around I realized that one of the film’s great successes is the way it uses Regina as a narrator to counterbalance the dramatic relationship between her parents. Less skillfully handled, this situation might have come off precisely as Achebe argued it does in Heart of Darkness, as a European product in which Africa plays exotic background prop to the disintegration of one petty European marriage. However, because the film maintains a productive balance between Regina the narrator and Regina the character, this easy ‘out’ becomes a much harder sell. As a narrator, Regina’s intermittent intrusions into the film’s fabric dramatically inflect how we encounter and understand the larger frame of reference that would otherwise make of her only a marginal cast member.  Indeed, it is the ease with which Regina integrates into her new Kenyan society that emphasizes her parents’ inability to follow suit and her effortless understanding of, and ability to negotiate between differences that underlines her mother’s final conclusion that “what I’ve learned here is how valuable differences are.” At first differences are something the Redlichs try and forget, wanting nothing more than to be identified by some larger social family category,  ‘German’ or ‘European,’ but not ‘Jewish.’ One likes to think that is only by learning to respect the local ‘difference’ into which they slowly integrate that they are able to see the problematic fissures in their traditional understanding of what it means to be ‘German’ or ‘European.’ In learning how their traditional attitudes towards Africans relegates and confines the latter to symbolic ghettoes, they are able to understand how that attitude, applied to Jews, translates into the same result. And I suppose my argument here is that, as a film, Regina’s narration is essential to this conclusion reaching the viewer.

[Running out of time!]

The film ultimately concludes with the promise that because we are all different, and differences are valuable, we are all, therefore, equally human in some grand, global sense of the word. This is a nice conclusion and a perfectly sensible, true moral. But the problem with flattening every human being down to their essentially similar elements is that, while it makes for a nice myth and a very instructive primer on how to think about one’s own being in the world, it does not change the fact that the world is not divided equally amongst human beings of similar stature. It’s nice to think of Africans as being ‘just as good as we are’ because, after all, it’s true. But the world is not structured in such a way as to make it a reality on a grand scale. The reality, unfortunately, is that Africans, like many living in the global south, remain at a greater risk for suffering, violence, and inhumanity simply because of where they are born. Without unintentionally creating a hierarchy of suffering, it’s hard to say that this has been more true than of Africa, which has witnessed unprecedented levels of human misery in the twentieth century and beyond (and before). The Redlichs, because of their place of origin, the color of their skin, and the relative prestige accorded to their status/education/culture, can leave Kenya and return to Germany to find new lives as fully human German citizens. As one of their native Kenyan neighbors had previously put it, their homeland will always be there waiting for them, and waiting to reabsorb them into a European structure. This, too, is a nice thought. But ultimately, though Regina has taught us that there are many productive ways of thinking about family and belonging, the film does eventually seem to come back around to that tricky problem Achebe articulates. IsNowhere in Africa just another excuse for us to watch Europeans arrive at self-congratulatory truths about themselves while set against the stunning backdrop of the African plains? I haven’t been able to decide in the 90 minutes I allotted to myself to think this out. That, however, is one of the problems of timed writing. Ten years on, this film, while hardly perfect, still makes for an engaging story set (at the very worst) inrelation to Africa, rather than merely ‘in’ it (like one can be ‘in’ a theme park). It poses important historical questions and does so while embedding them in an engaging enough family drama. I suppose I shouldn’t really be asking for much more than that, at least not in 120 minutes of film.

Thoughts of a random, scattered, or ‘free-floating’ variety were less generous in coming this time around. I’m not sure if it’s because my mind was particularly ‘grounded’ during this re-viewing or if I was simply distracted. Whatever the reason, there’s less coming your way than normal. I promise to rectify this oversight in my June review of John Singleton’s 2 Fast 2 Furious, which will be a ‘holy shitballs!’ kind of amazing. I promise. Anyway,

Free-Floating Thoughts:

• I think it must be because the emotional tenor of the story is channeled through Regina’s narration and not that of either of her parents, but I always feel so safe when the family’s native Kenyan cook, Owuor, is on screen. For Regina he is a de facto parental figure, a visual representation of the continent’s parental surrogacy.  He’s not protective in a stolid, ‘no-one-will-get-past-me’ kind of way, but rather in a very gentle and doting, yet nonetheless paternalistic and watchful manner. As with the character, so with the actor cast to play him, Sidede Onyulo, who gleams with warmth, respectability, and tenderness throughout.
• I found the camerawork in this film to be, at times, unnecessarily jumpy, affected, and, frankly, annoying. Neither the slow motion work, nor the sudden close-ups are particularly effective, if their point is to emphasize drama and/or register individual emotion. The extended montage of slow-motion frenzy that characterizes the film’s penultimate scene is particularly unnecessary, I think. Why not show the family and their now-normalized Kenyan compatriots swatting and burning away locusts in real time? Nothing seemed added by the slowdown and there was certainly nothing gained.
• For a European film about Africa, Nowhere in Africa does a pretty solid job of not overusing what we have come to think of as ‘traditional African film’ music (or, more accurately, the music of films about Europeans playing out their own little dramas against an African backdrop). However, there are moments when we’re meant to read Regina’s interactions with Owuor as ostensibly tender and innocent and childlike, and both the slow-mo shots accompanying these moments, as well as the chirpy background score, really got my goat. Perhaps I am too enamored with subtlety, but this felt a little too much like being hit over the head with sweetness. Bonked with love, you might say.
• At first I was nonplussed at why they would translate the German into English subtitles but not the Swahili, thinking that this was either someone’s colossally lazy oversight and/or the magic of cultural imperialism at work. It was only later when I realized, to my chagrin, that the Swahili would in fact be translated, but only when our German protagonists had themselves begun to understand it (first Regina, then Walter, then, grudgingly, Jettel).  This has the effect of placing one in the same disorienting situation as the Redlichs themselves, particular the two parents, whose resistance to Africa in its various manifestations derives from their initial inability to decolonize their own minds.
• In a certain light, and from a certain angle, Juliane Köhler (Jettel) looks a heck of a lot like Juliette Binoche.
• Ok, the German pronunciation of ‘Regina’ just sounds nicer than the English one. Really.

Ten Years Ago: View From The Top

EJ Legaspi, our contributor from the Philippines, flies the not-so-friendly skies for the second time with his brand new re-view of “View from the Top.”

One lazy Sunday afternoon, as I as browsing through the DVD section, I spied what looked like a promising rom-com starring Gwyneth Paltrow. The movie promised a talented cast, an interesting fairy tale in the sky, and what seemed to be a late Eighties/early Nineties setting. I was sure I had a keeper, so I bought it, popped it in my PS2 and settled in for a nice evening with a movie that surely didn’t have to be taken too seriously.

By the time the credits rolled, I was less than elated. I don’t think I hated it that much because I didn’t bother to throw or give my copy away, but what exactly was about this movie that made me see it once only to let it gather ten years’ worth of dust on my shelf.

So if this movie had me giddy with much excitement on first viewing, this second time around had me a very cautious, after all I’ve been burned by it once. My friends chided me for overthinking this one. It’s a brainless movie. It’s meant to be fun. Can’t you just have fun with it?

That is precisely my problem. I really wanted to have fun with it. I really wanted to love it. But something about this movie really rubbed me the wrong way, and I just had to find out.

After seeing again, I finally understand why. View from the Top is so unevenly told, with poorly written characters, that it constantly jars your viewing experience that you never either feel for the characters or fully buy into the hokey premise.

First of is the main character, Donna Jensen, who also serves as the narrator for the film. As if “Don’t Stop Believing” playing over the opening wasn’t enough, Donna states it again for the audience, that she is just a small town girl with big dreams of getting out of her dreary life.

It’s a classic trope that I love but for some reason, it doesn’t work. First reason is Ms. Paltrow herself. While I loved her in films like Shakespeare in Love and Sliding Doors, I don’t buy her in this character. Maybe it’s because her character is so poorly written. She’s pretty, she works hard, and she has values, but she has no real motivation and no real character flaw. Now perfection, like maybe a Disney princess, can be acceptable, except that there’s nothing really interesting about her. Largely because, the audience is never allowed to think or feel for themselves.

The film chooses to tell the story three times over at many key instances. First they will play some Eighties/Nineties music. Great tracks, I might add and music that I would listen to, and coupled with the very obvious commentary on the action. This isn’t a very complicated film, so there really isn’t any subtext to enhance. However, the movie frequently adds a third layer of Donna’s inner monologue dictating to the audience how she feels. Thus, I felt, as an audience member, I could never be fully engaged in the film because it was always talking down me and telling me how to think or feel at every single plot point.

The plot itself does not help either. Her boyfriend dumps her, but since we never spend enough time with them, we don’t necessarily feel bad for her. When she gets inspired by Sally Weston (Candice Bergen), the world’s most famous flight attendant and motivational speaker, she successfully navigates her way from a budget airline to being a trainee for a big airliner, Royalty Airlines, all due to her enthusiasm and hard work.

However, the complication of the plot has her stuck in Royalty Express, the budget arm of Royalty Airlines. The good news is that she meets and falls in love with her acquaintance, Mark Ruffalo, and quickly settles into the love and comfort she had never known. And it’s from this that her primary conflict stems from, her inability to get her dream position of “Paris, First-class, International” and her inability to commit to her dreamboat in the person of Mark Ruffalo’s character. And the movie goes out of its way to disguise the fact that these two are both out of her reach and incompatible.

Her international career was usurped by the unscrupulous Christine Montgomery (Christina Applegate), who switches their final flight attendant exam and thus nabbing the more prestigious route for herself. Christine is the stock dumb slacker slut, who is one of her friends from her commuter airline days. They’re portrayed as best friends, but apart from being roommates and being co-workers, there really isn’t much to base the friendship on. A far more interesting friend, Sherry (Kelly Preston, who is very much wasted in this film), who wanted the job more than Christine, was ditched early in the film probably because she was too nice to do the deed. Never for once does the audience doubt that Christine would do such a deed, and thus I can’t help but feel that Donna deserved her misfortune if she was dumb enough to be friends with such an overtly terrible person.

Speaking of dumb, once she gets her dream, Donna seems to have gone out of her way to make her life ever harder by convincing herself that she can’t be with Mark Ruffalo once she has her job. Which is rather curious for me because doesn’t she work for an airline? I know being a flight attendant is hard work and that it is difficult for relationships to work when you’re constantly flying across the Atlantic, but shouldn’t she get free flights back to Cleveland, where her all-to-perfect, but dorky enough to be relatable, boyfriend lives?

Murphy Brown Saves the Day

Thankfully, any problem Donna seems to encounter is always resolved by Candice Bergen’s character, Sally Weston. She’s the fairy godmother of this story who grants Donna with the inspiration, and the means to achieve her dreams. She singles her out for greatness early in the film, recognizing her hunger – something I did not see in Paltrow’s eyes, and once things got rough, she moves her magic by weaving through Royalty Airlines bureaucracy much to the disdain of the frustrated, cross-eyed, head of training Mike Whitney (Mike Myers in a role I desperately wanted to love). Finally, when Donna was too dense to realize that she needed to have someone in your life, Sally Weston, jumps back into her uniform to free Donna from her shift to fly to her Mark Ruffalo, whose name still escapes me, oh wait, there, I googled it, Ted.

If it isn’t obvious yet, apart from being a workaholic, Donna doesn’t really do anything to achieve her dreams. She always relies on the goodwill of a powerful woman, like Cinderella. But unlike Cinderella who worked hard to be loved by her family, Donna was doing everything for herself. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, it does question whether or not she deserved her happy ending. Yeah, well maybe she did, but I still call to question her intelligence or at the very least her common sense.

In the very last scene, the film shows us Donna’s compromise to make her relationship with Ted Ruffalo work. She becomes a pilot for Royalty Express. And this baffles me. Wouldn’t it have been more reasonable to have just settled for being a flight attendant again with Royalty Express? Never once did she indicate an inclination to become a pilot. Her only interaction with a pilot was early in the film with the flirty Rob Lowe co-pilot, who was in two scenes. The skills needed to become a pilot and being a flight attendant are very different, and I don’t think one is necessarily better than the other. Did Donna feel the need to prove herself by not settling for less than what she wanted? If that’s the case, then she’s a very conceited character and I don’t like her very much. And that final shot of her with a smug look towards the camera proves it.

I have to admit, I did get a couple of good lines from the film that I even forgot came from the film, namely the Sally Weston mantra “Paris, First-class, International” and a chuckle-worthy line from Mike Myers involving assessing a window. However, these all came from the late first and early second acts of the film, and I suspect many of those who watch this as their guilty pleasure enjoy these parts the most. That and Candice Bergen, who is at the top of her game and whose voice I just want to listen to over and over again. And maybe Christina Applegate, who is just so terrible in this film, but I love her anyway. And yeah, Mark Ruffalo, if you’re anything like my friends who are in love with him.

But definitely not Gwyneth Paltrow. And from what I hear, she seems to agree.

Ten Years Ago: Bend It Like Beckham

Resident musicologist Max DeCurtins revisits Bend It Like Beckham and scolds its naive approach to music, college sports, and the treatment of the Other.

These days, I tend to approach any writing at all with the skeptical, critical, and sometimes self-addled mindset of an academic trained in the humanities. Today, however, I’ve been in an all-day funk, to the point where only the bliss of homemade fettucine carbonara has been able to coax me even partially out of these uninvited doldrums. Most days, fettucine carbonara and two glasses of sauvignon blanc would make me considerably more sanguine. Today, as I sat down to re-view Bend it Like Beckham with my bowl of garlic- and parsley-scented deliciousness, the better my pasta became with every bite, the worse became my impression of the movie. This isn’t to say that I don’t still find the movie charming—I do—but today, everybody and everything takes a little bit of a beating.

So, Bend it Like Beckham. I distinctly remember liking it back in 2003. It seemed well-executed, inspired even. And it is well-executed; its timing is handled expertly, if not very creatively. It features plenty of attractive actors and a generous sprinkling of [ɪnɪtˀ]s which, along with other British-isms, helps promote the movie’s own exoticism even as it exoticizes Punjabi Sikh culture. (It’s all very meta, innit?)  It also treats sports in a way that I, notably sports-indifferent, find quite understandable: one person’s passion for a sport, and her discovery of a community that shares that passion. While in the States soccer doesn’t generate nearly the kind of revenue and media attention that (American) football, basketball, and baseball do, I can’t help but find the movie just a touch naïve in 2013. That Jess and Jules can get full-ride sports scholarships to Santa Clara merely hints at the bloated, corrupt, self-important worlds of American collegiate sports and the national sports franchises. (You may ask yourself how other institutionalized activities, like fine art, theatre, ballet, etc. differ from the monstrosity that is the American sports obsession. Surely they’re just as self-important? Perhaps, but they don’t receive a tenth of the attention—or the funding—that professional sports receive; to quote Rep. Mark Richardson of The West Wing: “As long as there’s been a Congress, there have been multibillion-dollar boondoggles. We’d just like to share in them a little bit, please.”)

Beckham shows off some of its strength in its casting. Parminder Nagra (Jess) discharges her role with aplomb. Keira Knightley (Jules), not yet known to the world for her role as Elizabeth Swann in 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (note to the esteemed editor of this venerable blog – I hereby stake my claim on Pirates) [editor’s note: you can have it], seems here almost like a prelude to that performance, which unfolds in much the same manner. Juliet Stevenson, apparently more than a little typecast as Jules’ neurotic, overbearing mother, fits the bill in more ways than one (more on this later). Jonathan Rhys-Meyers (Joe) has perhaps the weakest part in the core ensemble, his Abercrombie appearance falling short of compensating for his inner conflict with misogynistic tendencies. Joe’s position on things never quite feels settled; on the one hand he constantly self-deprecates for coaching women instead of men, and does seem to express genuine hope that he’ll be promoted to coaching men, yet at the end of the film he chooses to continue coaching the women even when offered the opportunity to coach the men. One can’t exactly decide what this means, or to what degree it resembles a Republican publicly supporting a social position only after it’s been proven politically palatable.

How We Got Into the Other, and How to Get Out

Bend it Like Beckham positively wallows in its dealings with the Other. It presents but does not offer commentary, depicts but not confronts, and even in its presentation, it’s not particularly memorable. Take Tony’s coming out: blander than cheap ice cream from CVS, all he can manage to say is “No, I really like David Beckham.” Jess finds herself on the receiving end of a racial slur (“she called me a Paki”), but it takes an attuned viewer to understand why this constitutes a slur; Chadha leaves India’s and Pakistan’s mutually belligerent relationship completely unexplored. Joe’s Irish, but the history invoked by his self-identification more than likely flies over the heads of the movie’s non-British audiences.

My problem with this lies partly on a meta-level: Beckham is only one in a long list of movies that present stylized, exoticized portraits of their particular Other. Not only do I get the sense that the characterization is dated, but seldom mentioned is the implication that this particular Other is more Other than the…others. From My Big Fat Greek Wedding to The Family Stone, whether it’s Greeks, Jews, Italians, Irish, Indians, gays or geeks, we as audience feel encouraged by these movies to find one culture more exotic than another. So many of these presentations of the Other, whether movies or TV shows, never quite make it clear that we are, each and every one of us, each and every culture, crazy and weird; it’s perhaps this lack of forthrightness that begins to explain why so much contemporary humor is exceedingly ironic.

Madamina, il catalogo è questo:

Just as racism, sexism, homophobia and religious phobias permeate the movie, so too does it traffic in other presented-but-unexamined treatments. If you’ve read my previous contributions to Ten Years Ago, you know what’s coming next: by “other treatments” I am, of course, referring to the music, and in particular the way that movies meant for (or most accessible to) Western audiences use Western art music.

I can’t ignore the blatant, even grotesque moment of “musicism” in Beckham, in which Jess, preparing her final penalty kick of the crucial game, hallucinates and sees her wizened relatives dancing in front of the goal instead of the players struggling to guard each other. This moment, the run-up to the kick, and the kick itself, are accompanied by none other than Nessun dorma. Western classical music is absent, totally absentfrom this movie, except for the “big finish”? No other musical idiom employed in the movie is equal to the task? Or does it—like classic Looney Tunes cartoons, but without the cleverness of Carl Stalling—simply appropriate opera as a representation of the absurd? And why Nessun dorma, in whose (ab)use Bend it Like Beckham is not alone? Why not something from Così fan tutte or Leporello’s famous patter aria from Don Giovanni? In the context of Beckham, Puccini sticks out like Stevenson’s reference to the Spice Girls (in the *present* tense).

Free-Floating Thoughts

 

If we’re really being honest, one of the best features of this movie in fact has nothing to do with the film and everything to do with the DVD release: it contains a special feature dedicated to the cooking of aloo gobi. They say an army marches on its stomach, and foods do seem to highlight in an immediate way the beauty and diversity of cultures. It takes me back to a college-era conversation with Stevi Costa in which, nerdy linguistics enthusiasts that we are, we concocted an idea for a course focused on the linguistics of food. Oh, the memories.

Earlier I noted that Juliet Stevenson “fit the bill” for Beckham in several ways, one of which is her homophobic insinuations regarding Jess’ and Jules’ relationship (and her later hypocritical attempt to cover her homophobia). According to this amazing thing called the Internet, Chadha had originally written the two leads’ relationship as a romantic one, but revised the script out of concern for its reception among the very same socially conservative community at which she pokes fun on film. Maybe that’s hypocritical, maybe not, but am I the only one to think that it might have been an interesting direction to have Joe and Tony get together instead?

The Spice Girls. Christ, I’m old.