Meshes #4: Sideways and Old Joy

For my fourth installment of “Meshes” over at the great streaming video/film criticism site Fandor, I address the complexities of friendship in Alexander Payne’s Sideways and Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy.

Ginger Snaps (Fawcett, 2000)

Werewolves. Horny teens. Ginger Snaps. Here’s my review for Not Coming to a Theater Near You‘s “31 Days of Horror.”

Meshes #1: Miranda and Maya

Exciting news! I’m writing a new image essay column entitled “Meshes” for Kevin B. Lee’s excellent Keyframe Blog at Fandor. On a monthly basis, I’ll pick two films from different decades and examine how they stylistically and thematically overlap, using stills from each to juxtapose my thoughts.

My first entry highlights the aesthetic relationship between Miranda July and Maya Deren and two of their most well-know films. Meshes #1.

Yi Yi (Yang, 2000)

Edward Yang is one of my favorite filmmakers, so it was a pleasure reviewing his last film, Yi Yi (A One and a Two) for the Criterion Blu-ray release. This is one of those films I could watch endlessly, and even at three hours it feels swift. Sublime, warm, melancholy, and honest. You can find my review at Slant.

“Actuality Dramas” of Allan King (1967-2005)

I had a sort of spiritual awakening watching The Actuality Dramas of Allan King, the new indispensable Criterion Eclipse box set containing five films that represent the wide-ranging scope of the Canadian filmmaker’s epic non-fiction career. Each film displays King’s genuine and generous humanity for human subjects on the fringes of society. King’s is a cinema of watching, waiting, and finally understanding the complexities of subjects like trauma, aging, marriage, and death. When taken as a collective piece of art, these films are nothing short of astounding. My review can be found at Slant Magazine.

The Manchurian Candidate (Demme, 2004)

Jonathan Demme’s scathing remake of The Manchurian Candidate is one of those rare films that gets better with age, growing more politically poignant with each exposed cover-up, corrupt politician, and devastating corporate malfeasance. Upon it’s 2004 release, the film seemed too paranoid, maybe even loony for digging so relentlessly into the wide-ranging corruption choking democracy in the post-9/11 Bush-age. Now, Demme’s dynamic and often brilliant thriller feels like one of the most relevant films of the last decade, a diabolical examination of a cracking national ideology that’s not paranoid enough.

From the waving American flag pushing the opening credits into oblivion, Demme positions devoted but conflicted Army Officer Ben Marco (Denzel Washington) on the fringes of disjointed perception and horrifying reality. Marco’s quest to find the truth is more about alleviating his own interior monologue than unveiling an international act of treason, but the evolution of his momentum inevitably begins to represent a growing national outrage. Ideological symbols and political platforms construct a distrustful landscape brimming with faux nationalism, shunning the American everyman in favor of global power. The razor-sharp pacing, the nuanced mirror performances by Washington and Liev Schreiber, and Demme’s schizophrenically reflective mise-en-scene organically feed into Tak Fujimoto’s river of sharp hues, creating a cinematic stained-glass window awash in menacing red, white, and blues.

The Manchurian Candidate confronts the very essence of what it means to be a conflicted American in the modern age, the varying degrees of devotion to country and self and the greedy capitalistic center controlling us all. But Demme’s film isn’t anti-capitalism or anti-government, just pro-justice. The Manchurian Candidate is one of the few genuinely entertaining and sophisticated Hollywood films that is also a political manifesto on corporate greed and manipulation, a dual level for those willing to measure morality on film. But beneath the technical genius lies a brimming anger for the smug indifference of those willing and able to live in a selfish fantasy of their own design, a veritable Candyland hallowed by the real “evildoers”. For this telling dichotomy, Demme’s textural powder keg is nothing short of revelatory.

In My Skin (de Van, 2002)

Sometimes people just fall apart, and Marina de Van’s effectively opaque horror film In My Skin charts such a sudden degeneration of body and mind. Along with directing the film, de Van stars as Esther, a mid-level business woman who slices her leg in a accident at a house party, then becomes obsessed with the wound in a very unhealthy way. Throughout the film, de Van is both the perpetrator and the victim wrapped up into one masochistic package, resulting in a complex and astute examination of self-inflicted horror.

In My Skin focuses intently on Esther’s physical and mental trauma, first beginning with her sly fascination with the texture of scars and the taste of the blood running down her leg. But gradually de Van closely reveals an increased activity of violence, paralleling Esther’s trance-like state with the jarring brushes of reality that inevitably interrupt her destructive rituals. In one audacious sequence, Esther and her boss take prospective clients out to a fancy dinner. Suddenly, underneath the table Esther begins to cut her arm over and over, relishing the arousal of the act while trying to maintain an attentive guise with her customers. It’s like Hitchcock downed a pint of Cronenberg and spewed out some Argento, for no other reason than to see the audience squirm.

de Van keeps the narrative crosshairs aimed at Esther’s disturbing drift into isolation, finally ending on a wide shot of startling confrontation and disavowal. Esther seems to understand what she’s become, even if the viewer doesn’t.  As she lies on a bed soaked in blood, her eyes gaze directly into the camera and antagonize our perception of violence and pain. Can we ever comprehend such a destructive process without recognizing the suffering soul underneath? de Van makes it difficult, keeping us distant from Esther’s character and close to her actions. But labeling or explaining such an act doesn’t come close to answering Esther’s traumatic need for pain. It just further complicates her plight, making In My Skin a very effective horror film about the physical ramifications of pent up interior conflict.

The Holy Girl (Martel, 2004)

If La Cienaga abstracts Lucrecia Martel’s obsession with sound and space by exploring menacing, dynamic open areas, her second film The Holy Girl compartmentalizes and purifies these same aesthetics within a confined, suffocating locale – a bare-bones Argentinean hotel. Martel shows there’s no escaping the inevitable bursts of energy when bodies in motion collide, when a gaze turns into so much more than a connection, but a deception of intent. Religion and natural selection battle through every room, between young and old, as characters either settle for stasis or attempt to fill voids created by past failures.

Amalia (Maria Alche), the young teen at the heart of Martel’s guise, takes her fascination with an older doctor as a god-given evocation, albeit one initiated by an earlier moment of perversion. Her confusion, excitement, and disappointment create an unsettling conflict between weakness and morality, one that ties in brilliantly with Martel’s continuous use of the close-up. These shots display faces barely obscured, favoring ears, lips, hair, clear incarnations of sensory build-up, never allowing an easy recognition of place.

Martel’s style is both distancing and fascinating, connecting characters through meticulous framing while separating their ability to communicate with jarring uses of off-screen sound. It seems all of Martel’s films, especially The Holy Girl, demand multiple viewings to break down the director’s layered environments and ambiguous characters. But on first glance, it feels like a tragedy unfolding in the sparest of decisive moments, ones most directors ignore far too often.