FILM REVIEW: THE DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL

Charlotte (Kirsten Wiig), Minnie (Bel Powley) and Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård in The Diary of a Teenage Girl.

Adol-l(ic)esentiousness

By John Esther

San Francisco, California, 1976. The kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst is the news story du jour. It is a time of permissibility. The radical politics of the 1960s are gone. Noxious disco, swapping couples, and cocaine are in full swing.

In one particular home in The City by the Bay, 15-year-old Minnie Goetze (Bel Powley) is looking for love and loins in the wrong places. A budding artist, she draws a gigantic woman who rules the streets of San Francisco (brought to “life” by animator Sara Gunnarsdottir.) Minnie has dreams, desires, woes and whimsy, which she records in her diary. She also has the desire to sleep with “The handsomest man in the world,” Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård).

However, Monroe is a lot older than Minnie.

Meanwhile, Minnie’s mother, Charlotte (Kristen Wiig continuing to impress), is clueless to her daughter’s daily activities and aspirations. Once a raving beauty, at least she claims, Charlotte spends her life in a drift of drugs, "living nostalgia ([less] humble pie [than] bitter fruit"). Since her divorce to Minnie’s father, Pascal (Christopher Meloni), Charlotte had to find a job at a local library; but work and motherhood do not stop her from partying every chance she gets. Indeed, these responsibilities seem to generate it.

Charlotte's number one party pal is Monroe.

Based on the novel by Phoebe Gloieckner, writer-director Marielle Heller’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl is not your typical summer film fare. Few films this frank about teenage sexuality are found in American cinema. (Adolescent desire in French film is old hat.). Americans are still repressed when it comes to sexuality. And the last person who should be thinking about sex in “God’s country” is an American teenage girl. (Never mind, the US has the highest teenage pregnancy in the industrialized world. Thanks to all that jabber about abstinence.)

Rather than receive the typical Hollywood movie meme where the unremarkable teenage dude -- after a series of mishaps, pranks and bullies (usually handsome, rich dudes) -- gets the remarkable girl, The Diary of a Teenage Girl offers a more realistic approach where the awkward adolescent girl gets the older dude – tapping into his psyche where the conquest of the virgin is nearly unstoppable.

Their relationship, rather than titillating, is poised for stress. Monroe knows the ramifications if he gets caught. He will be arrested, lose Charlotte and be plagued as a sex offender the rest of his life, but the triumph for him is worth the risk. Legally speaking, he is a sexual predator. As far as the story goes, at best, he is a damn lascivious fool. For her naive part(s), Minnie seems clueless to the illegalities of such a relationship.

Powley, who was in her early 20s when the film was shot, gives a powerful and believable performance as the titular character. Minnie is awkward yet ambitious, eager yet earnest, troubled and troublesome. She begins to understand the power of her sexuality and it disturbs her. Minnie wants to use it for good via pleasure, not the domination of others via their desire.

Heller seems to agree. Audiences looking for some petty, petite bourgeois punishment for female sexual transgressions will be disappointed. This is not a story about how damaging sex can be for a young teenager, but how it is simply a part of life. It is about identity and growing up. Sex happens.

 

 

 

 

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LAFF 2015: INFINITELY POLAR BEAR

A scene from Infinitely Polar Bear.

Boston blues

By Ed Rampell

Emmy-nominated screenwriter Maya Forbes’ Infinitely Polar Bear marks an auspicious directorial debut. This intensely personal film, which is reminiscent of Francois Truffaut and Richard Linklater’s movies about childhood, recreates Forbes’ troubled Boston girlhood during the 1970s. Indeed, Forbes’ own daughter, Imogene Wolodarsky, plays Amelia Stuart, who is mostly raised by her manic depressive father Cameron Stuart (Mark Ruffalo) after her mother, Maggie Stuart (Zoe Saldana), leaves the family to pursue a master’s degree in Manhattan in this heartfelt, touching and often humorous feature.

Somehow Imogene and her sister Faith (the delightful Ashley Aufderheide, the central casting version of an adorable biracial child) must cope with being raised by a mentally ill parent, while mom strives to support the family by advancing herself through higher education. Cameron is at the center of the saga, which is often ruled by his moods, his highs and lows. Although a Boston blueblood from a privileged background, these Brahmins have more or less cut the erratic Cam off from the family fortune. To tell you the truth, he actually is a loving, attentive (if decidedly unconventional) dad and the added responsibility of raising his daughters as a solo parent while Maggie studies in New York seems to somewhat ground him.

As the oft exasperating Cam, Ruffalo turns in a poignant performance. However, Infinitely Polar Bear (the term Cam’s children use for his bipolar condition) never fully explains why the beautiful, ambitious Maggie would marry a n’er-do-well loser like Cam, who spent their entire first date regaling Maggie with stories about his mental illness. What did she miss in this conversation?

As a female the sultry Saldana is far more attractive than Ruffalo is as a male, so why she wed this guy who becomes, at one point, institutionalized remains pretty much a mystery. Let alone why she had two children with this total flake (albeit a sometimes lovable one). One half suspects that Maggie attends a far away graduate school to get away from Cam as much as because she realizes that she must receive an advanced degree so she can provide for her kids (all “three” of them). I didn’t buy their relationship; perhaps this lapse in credulity is because Infinitely Polar Bear is told from a daughter’s point of view, and it may be too difficult and painful to fully pry into and comprehend one’s own parents’ tumultuous private lives.

Another shortfall is how little Infinitely Polar Bear deals with the fact that the couple is multi-racial and their children are biracial. As the massacre in Charleston and a string of police/vigilante killings of blacks demonstrate, racism is very much alive and un-well, still a dominant feature of American life. Indeed, in writing about U.S. history one could justifiably paraphrase Marx and Engel’s dictum on class in chapter 1 of The Communist Manifesto by proclaiming: “The history of all hitherto existing American society has been the history of race struggles.” If that is still true in 2015 USA, imagine how much truer it must have been in 1970s Boston, when the city was gripped with convulsions over busing in order to desegregate schools. But Infinitely Polar Bear largely ignores and glosses over the issues of race and of two black children being raised largely by a very Caucasian father.

In a canny, clever bit of casting, Keir Dullea plays Cam’s father Murray Stuart in a revealing cameo. Before Dullea attained fame as the astronaut who tangles with the murderous computer HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dullea depicted the eponymous David, a mentally ill young man who finds love with another troubled youth in 1962’s, David and Lisa.

Despite its flaws Infinitely Polar Bear is well worth seeing by moviegoers who cherish character-driven indies. This critic looks forward to Maya Forbes’ future features.

Infinitely Polar Bear also opens in theaters, tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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LAFF 2013: AIN'T THEM BODIES SAINTS

A scene from Ain't Them Bodies Saints.

Miss take

By Don Simpson

Writer-director David Lowery’s Ain’t Them Bodies Saintsis a cinematic meditation on poor, rural Texas life in the 1970s (though it often feels like the 1920s or 30s). It is Bob’s (Casey Affleck) desperate economic situation and intense desire to support Ruth (Rooney Mara) that has driven him to become an outlaw. There is presumably very little work available, so Bob’s only available option is to steal from others. These perceived external pressures at work against Bob are somewhat similar to Kit’s situation in Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973). Both films also allude to psychological issues at play within the minds of their male antiheroes. The men are blindly obsessed with their girlfriends to disastrous proportions.

Ain’t Them Bodies Saints ain’t just about obsession; it is also about the deteriorating effects of guilt and secrets on one’s soul. Unlike Bob, Ruth seems to understand the grim reality that she and Bob will never be together again, so Ruth has sentenced herself to a loveless life of chastity to punish herself for the crime for which Bob is doing time. Ruth will never be happy because she knows that Bob has offered up his life for her freedom, while Bob will not be happy until he is reunited with his family. All because of one simple mistake — for which nobody died — Ruth and Bob are destined to be unhappy for the rest of their lives.

Like that of an early Malick film (Days of Heaven), cinematographer Bradford Young showcases iconic rural landscapes in transcendent magic hour photography. Lowery’s film is obsessed with the textures and degradation of rusting metal, peeling paint and splitting wood. Everyone and everything is covered with a thick layer of dirt.


Ain't Them Bodies Saints screens at LAFF 2013: June 15, 7 p.m., Regal Cinemas; June 17, 4:50 p.m., Regal Cinemas. For more info: www.lafilmfest.com

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FILM INTERVIEW: OLIVIER ASSAYAS

A scene from Something in the Air.

Enough for Ahead

 

By Ed Rampell

 

Following the Boston Marathon bombing the new rightwing mantra is “radicalization.” French filmmaker Olivier Assayas’ new feature Something in the Airis about the process of radicalization -- but by revolution, not religion. Set shortly after France’s historic worker-student mass strike of May 1968 Something in the Air’s politicized protagonists encounter anarchists, Maoists, Trotskyists and the counterculture as the young militants come of age when, as Assayas says, “everything was political” and many of his generation felt that world revolution was imminent. With this film and his 2010 epic Carlos --about the Venezuelan terrorist known as “Carlo the Jackal” -- Assayas shows he is one of the planet’s top political directors. We interviewed Assayas at, of all places, Beverly Hills after an advance screening of Something in the Air.

 

JEsther Entertainment: Recently we’ve seen huge revolutionary upsurges in the Middle East, North Africa; here in America we had the Occupied movement and the indignant in Spain and Greek general strikes. Does part of you still dream and hope there could be a revolution?

Olivier Assayas: Yes. But as much as I believe in those political movements, as much as they give one hope, because it gives a notion that youth again believes that it can have a collective effect on society, the way they envision politics is very different from whatever the 1970s’ were. Because for good or bad the 1970s were utopian. The 1970s believed in the possibility of turning society upside down, of taking over. It was utopian, but then it had some sort of reality because at least in France we had a model, which was May ’68, which was like three years old, and it comes as close as it gets to being an actual revolution. So, yes, this dream of a revolution, it was utopian, but then it was also grounded into something that had actually happened, that had a solid reality. Today, people don’t think of a revolution. They think of adapting society, of making the hope of more fairness, more justice, more social justice, more generosity, which are old things -- the modern world has become so brutal that of course, you have to recognize and endorse. But in the 1970s it would have been called “reformist,”which was an insult.

JE: What role can cinema play in today’s politics?
OA: Cinema in general plays a very modest role in politics. Politics are connected to real life, to real struggle, to the actual pain of real life people, and movies are very, very minor compared to that in terms of the effect they can have. The only thing movies can do is, eventually, a movie like this is have some sort of dialogue with youths who would be attracted to some kind of involvement into politics. Because often, they idealize the 1970s and movies don’t really represent the 1970s. It’s a way of giving some kind of portrait to that period that can be understandable, can be some sort of reference point and which also could remind that they could be in a generation not so, so, so far from us. The conscience that a specific generation could change the world.

JE: Can you discuss some of the other specific rock songs used in your film and how they express the politics and other inner meaning you were getting cross, as a “layer of illustration,” as you put it?

OA: I wanted to use specifically, protest songs to be present. So I used this Phil Ochs' song ("Ballad of William Worthy") that Johnny Flynn sings, because it’s from another era. But it was still around. Wherever you were, some guy would pop up and he’d be playing a song that came from that history of protest songs. It was very present. The actual song is more a song of the early ’60s, mid-’60s at the latest. And we are six or seven years but still it was just part of, those songs carried in terms of politics, in terms of involvement in politics, and was something that was extremely important in those years, yes, that I needed. In terms of the way I use songs, they all have a specific meaning, so it would be long and tedious to go through every single one of them. Maybe one way of dealing with this would be saying it’s the difference between the party in this film and the party we created in my movie called Cold Water, which I made in the mid-’90s, where I use a completely different soundtrack. Which was also pretty much a soundtrack of the 1970s, but used big names, it used the songs, my whole generation could relate to, like Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Credence Clearwater Revival, so on and so forth. Here, it’s a completely different ambient. For instance, when I’m recreating the similar party scene in Something in the Air we are at this country house, villa, which belongs to this rich family, and they’re having this kind of hip, cool party. You would not have music like Credence Clearwater Revival, it would be just uncool, right? You could have Captain Beefheart -- Captain Beefheart was believable in that context. Or Soft Machine or Incredible String Band, because they were underground, they were this avante garde thing.

JE: What kind of music do you like to listen to today?
OA: I listen to a lot of indie rock. But the thing is now it’s everywhere. It’s in fashion shows, it’s in commercials, when you go to a washroom in a hotel, it’s what you listen to. It’s everywhere and it’s becoming problematic in many ways for me. In the sense that my love of music, was also because the music carries something that’s not exactly revolutionary but it’s about values that are not the values of society. The world I come from is a world that is defined by the relationship between art and politics in a certain way. I think that’s something that’s getting lost now and so I have difficulty adjusting to that…It has do with the innocence of youth which I think the modern means of communication, the obsession with consumption is erasing, is destroying in a certain way. One essential aspect is that there was a belief in the future. People trusted the future. There was this hate, dislike, suspicion of the present, of anything that had to do with the material value of the present in the name of something that would be coming in the history. That’s also why people were so obsessed with political history, because political history of the 20^thcentury told them the lessons that would make them be successful with the revolution that would obviously happen in the very near future. Again, hope means belief in the future, literally. Today it’s something that’s gone. Because this kind of despair or loss of faith because the world is not changing. When you are kids today who grow up listening to politicians on TV or on the radio or in the newspapers, saying how important they are, how they have no grasp on the big issues of the world, how are they going to believe in politics? How are they going to believe that they can do something and change the world for the better? It’s not surprising that they lose faith in that and they lose faith in the future.

JE: Does Gilles sell out at the end of the film?
OA: I don’t think he does. Gilles discovers his true path. He realizes that making movies in the industry is not for him, and eventually there’s an answer in something that has to do with experimental or independent cinema. Maybe I’m deluding myself, but the reason why I ended up making movies is because somehow movies are about some kind of collective utopia, something you do together. It’s collective; it’s art you can share with people from all parts of society. In the context of independent filmmaking, when you are on a film set you’re working with people who are there not because they’re doing a job, it’s because people love what they do, and they want to be part of something bigger than them. I found a way through cinema, through independent cinema, to find a way to pursue the hopes of the utopias of the ’70s.

JE: What’s next?
OA: Next for me is a movie I will be doing with Juliette Binoche. It’s not the ’70s again; it’s today, it’s contemporary. [Laughs.] …It’s about acting, it’s about the relationship between reality and acting. Juliette plays a stage actress.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

  

 

 

 

 

 

  

                  

 

                       

 

 

 

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AFI 2012: SOMETHING IN THE AIR

A scene from Something in the Air.

The Dreamers outsiders

By Ed Rampell

We often label and lump the turmoil that swept America and the world with a series of assassinations, Civil Rights, the antiwar movement, Black Power, China’s Red Guard, the Prague Spring, feminism and so on under the broad rubric of “the ’60s.” Auteur Olivier Assayas’ Something in the Air sets the record straight, showing that the era’s radical fervor continued well into the 1970s.

The film follows the trajectory of a number of French youths as they wend their ways through the tumult of this insurgent hangover, when it seemed there was a world to be won. At the center is Gilles (Clement Metayer), a high school student whose life alternately intertwines with various friends, comrades and lovers like Laure (Carole Combes) and Christine (Lola Creton). Along the way is street fighting with the CRS/SS pigs; tossed Molotov cocktails; and the factional infighting that those who believe in “workers of the world unite” often specialize in. (It’s truly astonishing how people who profess solidarity frequently fight with one another, as if the revolution is their private property.) Air chronicles the faction fights between various leftwing tendencies -- anarchists, Maoists and what the subtitles unfortunately refer to as “Trotskyites.” (To use a racial analogy, this is akin to using the “N” word to describe adherents of Leon Trotsky, denigrating them as fifth columnist saboteurs. Whereas “Trotskyist” is a respectful term like “African American” is; it simply refers to followers of the Bolshevik apostle of world and permanent revolution. Two demerits for counterrevolutionary nomenclature, comrade translator!)

Along with extremist leftist ideology, youth of that generation also grew their hair long and contended with the counterculture’s bohemian influences in the form of drugs; Rock music (Something in the Air has a good period soundtrack); psychedelic light shows; underground newspapers; etc. There is even a strain of mysticism, as Jean-Pierre (Hugo Conzelmann) and Leslie (India Salvor Menuez), an American diplomat’s daughter, make the journey to the East, seeking enlightenment and what Leslie calls “the sacred dance.” Did any other revolutionary generation have to deal with such intense alternate lifestyle stimulus and choices?

Gilles, an aspiring artist, manages to keep his cool and not lose his head by pursuing painting and then filmmaking. An independent thinker, Gilles takes both his screenwriter father and a collective of militant moviemakers (a la Jean-Luc Godard during that period) to task for the same cinematic sin: Bourgeois pictures. Gilles criticizes the latter for using conventional film forms to try and render revolutionary subject matter and consciousness to the masses, which reduces their artistry (or lack of) to trite sloganeering. As Gilles pursues his destiny, does the not so proletarian protagonist sell out in the end?

The gifted Assayas also directed 1994’s Cold Water (a sort of forerunner to Air); 1996’s Irma Vep; a segment of the 2006 omnibus film Paris Je T’Aime; and the riveting 333-minute Carlos, about the ultra-left hit man, which flew by without a dull moment.

Something in the Air is, of course, a feature film with actors, Assayas’ script, production values, etc., yet it is among the best chronicles -- fictional or nonfiction -- of that heady heyday of radicalism and the young revolutionaries who tried, albeit imperfectly, to change the world for the better. Although I of course had nothing to do whatsoever with this work and grew up in New York, not near Paris, Something in the Air is probably the closest thing I’ve seen onscreen to “my” own biography. Indeed, on the exact day I left America to pursue my destiny (I’m still waiting, BTW) in the South Seas, Chairman Mao died.

In any case, if you weren’t alive or of age then to experience those days of rage and hope, when world revolution seemed imminent, the highly recommended Something in the Air will vividly, brilliantly bring that era alive for you. And if you did participate in that period when for a brief moment all things seemed possible, you can relive them during this movie masterpiece that helps us to remember when we were able, perchance, to dream.


Something in the Air screens Nov. 2, 7 p.m. Chinese 1 Theater; Nov. 4, 4:30 p.m. Chinese 5 Theater.

  

 

  

 

 

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FILM REVIEW: DARK SHADOWS

Barnabas Collins (Johhny Depp) in Dark Shadows.

Sinking to Lower Depp

By Don Simpson

Way back in the mid-1770s, Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) -- master of Collinwood Manor -- falls in love with Josette (Bella Heathcote), thus shattering the heart of his voluptuous chambermaid, Angelique (Eva Green). Unfortunately for Barnabas, the scorned woman is a real bitch of a witch. In retaliation, Angelique turns Barnabas into a vampire and buries him alive (well, technically undead).

Just shy of two centuries later, Barnabas is freed from his tomb and unleashed upon the strange glam rock world of the 1970s. The Collinwood Manor is horribly dilapidated and the remaining Collins family have fallen into financial ruin. Barnabas makes it his primary goal to help the family matriarch, Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (Michelle Pfeiffer), restore the economic vitality of the Collins name. In the meantime, Barnabas falls in love with Victoria (Heathcote, again) -- who looks a heck of a lot like Josette -- and must once again face the jealous wrath of Angelique, who is known in this century as Angie.

Dark Shadows is director Tim Burton’s eighth collaboration with Johnny Depp (Edward Scissorhands; Sleepy Hollow; Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street; etc). While most critics cite Alice in Wonderland as their low point, I would save that distinction for the Dark Shadows because despite their supposed interest in making this film, the duo seem to have not expended any effort on the story at all. Rather than developing a more reverent film, Dark Shadows is a mockery of the source 1960s television series -- turning a serious and subtle evening soap opera into a mindless spoof. In the television series, Jonathan Frid’s restrained portrayal of Barnabas is what adds an air of creepiness to the show. Depp, however, decides to play Barnabas with a level of camp that is rivaled only by his role as Captain Jack Sparrow in The Pirates of Caribbean franchise. In Depp’s hands, Barnabas is nothing more than a buffoonish clown -- no thanks to the embarrassing immaturity of Seth Grahame-Smith’s screenplay -- who recites one ridiculous line after another. Considering the infantile intellectual level of some of the sight gags, I can only imagine that Dark Shadows was written for a pre-pubescent audience. This also explains why Burton chose to go with absolutely no plot, opting for a two-note joke: Look at the silly vampire! Listen to what the silly vampire is saying!

Despite being Barnabas’ object of desire, Victoria disappears from the story for long stretches of time, yet somehow we are supposed to accept that Barnabas loves her. Allusions of her connection to Barnabas’ first love are dropped almost immediately, as if Burton and Grahame-Smith could not wrap their heads around such a “complex” concept. As with Angie -- who is purely a sex object -- Victoria’s purpose in Dark Shadows is merely a physical one. Another example is Chloë Grace Moretz’s seductive portrayal of Carolyn Stoddard, which is nothing more than a pedophile fantasy. Then, there is the live-in psychiatrist of Collinwood, Dr. Julia Hoffman (Burton's wife and regular performer Helena Bonham Carter), who is defined only by her alcoholism and cartoonishly colored hair. In Burton and Grahame-Smith’s hands, the women of Dark Shadows have no depth. They are only objects for us to see, but never know or understand.

However, the men of Dark Shadows do not fare much better. Elizabeth’s brother, Roger (Jonny Lee Miller) and his 10-year-old son, David Collins (Gully McGrath), get so little attention that I can only assume that they were only included to fill up some space in the  mansion. Jackie Earle Haley -- who plays Willie Loomis, the caretaker of Collinwood -- is really the only actor who seems to be trying to do anything in this film.

Further exemplifying Burton’s favoritism of images over story or dialogue, he uses a vibrant 1970s color palate as a backdrop. One could only assume that Burton thought a 200-plus-year old vampire would blend in too much in any other decade, so he chose to set this story in the 1970s. This also allows Burton to pummel us into submission with a cheesy 1970s pop soundtrack, including a shameless cameo by “No More Mr. Nice Guy” himself, Alice Cooper!

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