Rabbit again

I don’t remember reading Rabbit Redux when I was young and there is no copy at home. My 2008 copy has an image of a hand holding a chipped mug of coffee on the cover. The fingers are stained with printer’s ink but they look too small to be the hands of a former successful basketballer, as Harry was. Maybe they are the hands of his father who is a small but important character in the book. The image is kind of at odds with the drama of the book; the comforting domesticity of this working class image gives nothing away in terms of a story about the massive changes happening in American socitey, the shifts in the tectonic plates embodied in Harry's drift into experiments with drugs, new sexual partners and black consciousness. All this in Penn Villas, a new housing development on the edge of Brewer, Pennsylvania. (For some alternative covers, go here, here and here. I particularly like the Hangman cover.)

I stopped half way through the novel for a while. Harry spends much of the middle part of the story in a kind of loose vacuum. Like the first novel he is strikingly without agency; he floats into things without making real conscious decisions. Or if he is decisive, it’s quite short–term; should he have sex with Peggy Fosnacht that night? Actually it's not even that far ahead - it's more like should he have sex with Peggy Fosnacht, she has just unzipped her dress? Anatole Broyard, writing in 1971 when the novel was published says:

“He went back to Rabbit because he knew that it was too easy to have an intellectual or an artist as a hero. There is always a temptation to talk or think things out -- but with a guy like Rabbit, you have to act them out all the way, show what's happening to him, nakedly, without off-stage intellection or interpretation. The thought must be made flesh; the flesh, as in sex, made metaphor; the man in the street tormented into irony. Where Rabbit once ran away, he's now standing his ground, letting the world flow over and around him while he tries to keep his head above water.”

This is a fabulous description of what Updike is about in working with Rabbit.

I think, for a while, I found the drifting hard to read about. And I got sick of the black guy Skeeter. I think Updike wanted this effect but maybe he doesn’t want people to stop reading. I decided to have a break from reading Rabbit then really enjoyed it when I went back to it. Broyard reckons that Harry is climbing out on a limb (any limb, every limb) and swinging – trying to find something in the shifting morass that America is in. and trying to find traction for his own 36 year old self, fast wilting into middle age.

The three defining descriptors of American life in this book are the Vietnam War, the rise of black consciousness and the successful Apollo mission. (Interesting comparison the Space War and the Vietnam War)Other aspects also prevail like the ways in which middle class kids went searching for something different than their parent’s lives. Broyard has a nice way of describing this aspect of the book – Harry hooks up with a barely adult girl for a while: “In Jill, Updike explores the incompleteness -- in them and in ourselves -- that, like a vacuum, draws us toward very young girls.” Aaarrgh so scarily accurate, I think, about men.

I want to include a paragraph about sex so will edit this entry later; he writes so well about this business. What he also does well is the domestic; the fraught ties between Harry and his parents, the guilt and love, the depiction of both his parents is really exquisite. Then at the end, Stage Left: Mim, the sister, living the life not lived. Vivid, in-your-face Updike…

Alone in the world

I’ve been thinking about therapy and its literary and filmic representations lately. Purely by coincidence, I saw the films One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest and Men’s Group within a 24 hour period. Both films are broadly about men in trouble, though this is perhaps where the similarity ends.
I think I saw One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest last in 1976. It was quite shocking. Literally of course but that’s a pretty lame joke. I remembered the shocking aftermath of Nicholson’s treatment but not the way the film ended. I don’t know how prevalent lobotomies are any more. I saw it at a time when shock treatment was very controversial as was the institutionalisation of people. I saw it in the free-wheeling 70’s where the mood of rebellion against authority was very strong. I am betting that I saw it just as Whitlam had been kicked out of office and we in Australia were battling against the early, nasty impact of the Fraser government, the razor gang and, interestingly, the first incarnation of John Howard.

Filmsite.org describes it as

“one of the greatest American films of all time - a $4.4 million dollar effort directed by Czech Milos Forman. Its allegorical theme is set in the world of an authentic mental hospital (Oregon State Hospital in Salem, Oregon), a place of rebellion exhibited by a energetic, flamboyant, wise-guy anti-hero against the Establishment, institutional authority and status-quo attitudes (personified by the patients' supervisory nurse). [Forman himself noted that the asylum was a metaphor for the Soviet Union (embodied as Nurse Ratched) and the desire to escape.”

The film holds up but looks quite different to me now. I have a greater appreciation of where Milos Forman was coming from. He says in the support material for the film that he felt like he had been living in an asylum for 20 years in the Czech Republic. Most of the filming was done in the mental hospital; the actors would come in the morning and rehearse then just hang around getting themselves into the feel of the institution in the afternoon.

I see Nurse Ratched differently though. In some ways, I think she is treated unfairly – this is a film where the only women are whores or nurses and maybe this is how some of these dysfunctional men perceive women in general but it seems a little unfair that Ratched carries the entire can. The doctor, who is a real psychiatrist, is not demonised in the way that Ratched is, though it’s he who is responsible for what finally happens to Nicholson. A nurse, in reality wouldn’t have had that sort of power, even though Ratched is depicted as conducting the therapy sessions by herself. And in the first instance, the Nicholson character is incarcerated in prison because he has had sex with a 15 year old girl; it’s a construct that a director wouldn’t use now if he was looking for audience sympathy for the main character. There is some unpleasant gender stuff lurking in the dark recesses of this film but it is really about dysfunction, abuse of authority and agency.

Critic, Roger Ebert said it “is a film so good in so many of its parts that there's a temptation to forgive it when it goes wrong. But it does go wrong, insisting on making larger points than its story really should carry, so that at the end, the human qualities of the characters get lost in the significance of it all. And yet there are those moments of brilliance.” He and I both liked the small scenes of rebellion inside the ward and the depictions of the ways in which people collude with authority; the scenes showing just how hard it is to take stock, stand up for yourself.

Following my at-home screening of Cuckoo’s Nest, I went to see Men’s Group. I was very disappointed in this film. I had high hopes of this film representing my personal experiences of a women’s group on the big screen; the value of doing the work and the toughness of the experience. And it began promisingly with the very first meeting of the 5 men. This meeting was filled with the confusion and difficulty of making contact with other people; it felt authentic in the strange embarrassment of the session. Their consultant who says, at the outset ”This is not therapy. It’s simply a space to be safe and talk about things.” And this was the truth of the work that he does and that they are up to doing. The consultant seemed unable to work at any depth with the men in the room. They were there for the regular variety of issues that people (men?) face; loneliness, fathering problems, father problems, relationship issues, just generally being disconnected. And why they turned up again after the futility of that first session, I don’t know.

It gave me plenty of time during the film to think about the kinds of successful renderings of therapy on film. The best one for me is the fractious and flirtatious relationship of Dr Jennifer Melfi and Tony (or Anthony, as she likes to call him) Soprano. It is my favourite part of this series. Other people might reference the Analyse This/That films but they are much more about other things than therapy. Pyschotherapist, Irvin Yalom has done so much to render therapy an accessible and interesting thing in fiction and in his books about his practice. I’ve been profoundly influenced by his work. In Love’s Executioner he talks about 4 fundamental things that we need to come to terms with as humans. The first is obviously death. Another is our fundamental aloneness – not loneliness but aloneness. I can’t remember what the other two are but these two are big for me. Here is a little of an interview with him in Salon:

Q: “Most of us feel we do not want to think about death. But you assert that confronting death is a key to living a full, authentic, happy life. I wonder if you could describe in personal terms what living authentically means to you?”

A: “Certainly as I've grown older, I've been thinking a lot more about the end of my life, which may not be too far away. My father and his brothers all died relatively young because of heart conditions. So I think, Well, life is finite. I don't have unlimited years left, and I want to know what is more central to me and my life right now.

Above all, I don't want to do anything that feels repetitious. And I tell myself that I don't want to belong to any more committees or teach anymore, because the field is becoming drugs, pharmacotherapy. The next generation of therapists isn't going to be trained for psychotherapy because the insurance companies aren't going to be paying for it any longer.

What feels most central for me is being creative and looking at the way in which I have creative talents and gifts that I haven't used. I basically see myself as a storyteller engaged in ideas that have to do with an existential, deeper approach to life. I feel very uncomfortable with the idea of these gifts being unused.”

It reminded me of going to hear David Tacey and John Carroll talk about Jung at Readings. One of them said that in this secular society, we use stories to make meaning out of life. This statement sounds so painfully obvious but when I heard it, it resonated so much - this is the compelling thing about stories, in the absence of that large meta-narrative about God, we need some others. (The blog Thinking Shift has some writing about this topic.)

I think that when it comes down to it, this is why I felt so cross with Men’s Group. The film fluttered across the surface of the stories of these men; all of whom had deep and painful histories. The film-maker, Michael Joy, said “Within my own life I ended up needing some people outside of family and friends to talk to and I found myself going to a men's group this one evening and heard these guys' stories and just realised that there was a story there that had to be told.” Joy needed to hang around and do the stories justice. He needed to attend the men’s group for months to see what deep and painful issues were raised and worked through. If they were worked through. Or to read a little Yalom and see what universal truths can come from the process of therapy whne you stay with the pain of the person you are working with, when you linger.

So out of it all, when I talked about it with Naomi, my FFFF, we decided that there was merit in showing the fact that the 5 men were facing similar issues (as opposed to making a film about any one one of these characters seperately). Loneliness. Disconnection. Inarticulateness. Aggression. How to be a father. How to love a father. How to manage that sense of being alone in the world. These are the stuff of important stories; they make meaning for everyone. But while there is great merit in trying to work with these themes, the film did a pretty crap job of it.

It did, however, spawn this funny piece of dialogue between Margaret and David (At the Movies):

MARGARET: Getting away from that, I mean it’s interesting for me, having that sort of rawness of blokes’ emotions. How do you, as a man, react to that?

DAVID: I found it - I think I’m the sort of person who keeps my emotions in check.

MARGARET: Yeah.

DAVID: And so I don’t entirely recognise that, but I was impressed by the way the actors handled it and the way it developed during the course of the film. I would never go to a group session like the one in the film. Never.

MARGARET: I can imagine. No, but because, you know, I think that’s true of a lot of men. They’re too contained and they are in the beginning of this film.

DAVID: You’re looking...

MARGARET: It’s not easy to expose yourself.

DAVID: You’re looking at a very contained man, Margaret.

MARGARET: Oh, I know that, David.

DAVID: In case you didn’t know after all these years.

Taking no prisoners

“Visceral: 1: felt in or as if in the viscera, deep, 2: not intellectual : instinctive , unreasoning, 3: dealing with crude or elemental emotions, 4: earthy."

I seem to use the word “visceral” a lot more lately. If someone had asked me what it meant, I think I would have said “bloody, tangible, of the body” with an edge of violence. But maybe this is because it is often used about violent scenarios. Brainyquote has a number of examples of ways that other people have used the word including Penn Jillette who said “When you're watching Psycho, there's that moment when you have a visceral reaction to watching someone being stabbed. And then you have the intellectual revelation that you're not, and that's where the celebration comes in.” Then I was kind of surprised when I looked up the Macquarie and their definition related solely to the biological: “soft interior organs in the cavities of the body, eg the brain, lungs, heart, stomach and intestines”.

The word certainly came to mind a lot when I was watching the film Hunger. Seeing this film is like been run over. In a very sophisticated way. It is very, very violent, as you would expect in a film about a prison. It’s about the decision of IRA prisoner Bobby Sands to go on a hunger strike in 1981 to protest the fact that IRA prisoners were being treated like the criminal class of prisoners by the prison authorities.

I vaguely remember this in the news but little about the story. It is just one large fragment in the very long and fuzzy set of news clips that form my understanding of Northern Ireland’s politics. A 31 year-old colleague had never heard of the IRA. She’s not uneducated; it‘s just that “the troubles” have been sorted to some extent and Northern Ireland is no longer a key part of daily news bulletins. When Bobby Sands was starving himself to death, I was learning to teach in Swan Hill; I had other things on my mind.

The film opens with a set of images and sounds that take the viewer right into the guts of the prison. (Guts- visceral!!!) You hear rather than see a rattling of pots and pans in a protest rally. The noise becomes deafening, nearly unbearable, even as the close-ups of the items being banged look like pieces in a factory assembly line, then we experience some of the daily rituals through a prison officer who soaks his bloody knuckles in water and checks the undercarriage of his car for bombs before leaving for work. This is the almost the only time we experience events outside the prison except for voice-overs by Maggie Thatcher that contextualise the British Government’s position and one other challenging scene that helps to further unsettle us.

The film is very claustrophobic; the action is both internal to the prison and internal to the body. It’s a film which seeks to explore what happened at one historical point in time, to one person, without providing much surrounding context. This is a very interesting strategy. We learn almost nothing about the larger context except that both the IRA and the British authorities were extremely violent in pursuit of their conflicting goals. I like the fact that it is so concentrated but wonder how it might be interpreted by people who know nothing about the politics. In this case it becomes almost solely a film about the decision to use your body as a tool for political activism. Does a man have the right to kill himself and lead others to their own suicides? Will it accomplish anything? Won't this just play into the hands of Margaret Thatcher? The broader range of questions which we might now apply to suicide bombers or to asylum seekers who sew their lips together etc.

The visceral part? The hunger strikers had tried a “no wash” campaign which included smearing their own shit on the walls of the cells and flooding the hallways with urine. They are forcibly washed by guards. There are maggots. The feeling of being in this with them is intensifies by the lack of dialogue which pervades the first third of the film. There is a lot of silence which heightens the impact for other senses.

This is the first film for director Steve McQueen who is apparently an accomplished and well known visual artist. The visuals are really compelling. He pictures the inmates in one scene as a large group of Jesus like figures – they have long hair, beards and bare chest and their gauntness reminds me of the many, many images of Christ on the cross. This image is reinforced towards the end of the film when Bobby Sands collapses in the bathroom and is carried back to bed by a guard, Pieta style. And towards the end of the film, we begin to occupy Sand’s body, maybe devouring it in the way that some organs might be cannibalising other parts of the body in a kind of hideous and desperate attempt to stay alive. We hear and see the world in a fuzzy disconnected way as Sands is dying. His body is covered with suppurating sores. It’s pretty ghastly and hard to sit through.

Many reviewers have commented on the set-up of the film- in 3 acts with an extraordinary dialogue in the middle between Sands and a priest. It’s not necessary for me to describe that here except that it’s brave to expect an audience to stay the distance. This part enables us to understand why Sands has decided to take this course of action. "Putting my life on the line isn't the only thing I can do—it's the right thing." It tells us a little of Sands’ background; from an early age, he has been able to make tough decisions.

This long scene is characteristic of the whole film in that I felt for Sands but not in a deep emotional way- I was horrified by what happened to him, by the choice that he felt he had to make, horrified by the conditions in the prison, by the brutality of life for everyone in the prison (guards and prisoners) but film style is extremely dispassionate. Because of the sort of person I am, I usually like to connect with the characters – this enables me to feel things deeply and I don’t think the film provides this opportunity to any extent. It doesn’t diminish the film but has made me reflect about how film–makers get into your psyche and what the most effective techniques are.

For me, the film Wendy and Lucy, which I saw at the film festival, does this best. That film forced the viewer to experience the same anxieties and tension as the main character, by moving slowly through her emotional landscape, feeling her vulnerability and the strength of character. Maybe in Hunger, we just experience the strength of character and not the vulnerability and this is why I am not as emotionally connected. WE can see that their bodies are vulnerable but they are so tough in the face of the brutality that it's hard to feel the emotional force of the experience.

Despite this, I admire the film and the director. It’s powerful and interesting. It takes no prisoners. It's worth the difficulty of sitting through.

Lemon Tree

Yesterday, in the course of my work, I stopped to think about why the olive branch is a symbol of peace. Fortunately, at least for workplace efficiency, Wikipedia is at hand to respond to idle thoughts like this and it came up with the following; “In Western culture, derived from the customs of Ancient Greece, it (the olive branch) symbolizes peace or goodwill. The original link between olive branches and peace is unknown. Some explanations center on that olive trees take a very long time to bear fruit. Thus the cultivation of olives is something that is generally impossible in time of war.” So there. Not known. And then I thought a bit about Lemon Tree, a film that I saw last week.

The film, made by Israeli director Eran Riklis, explores what happens when the Israeli Minister of Defense and his wife move to a new housing development which is right next to an old grove of lemon trees owned by a Palestinian woman who has inherited the block from her father. The issue becomes one of security – how can a government minister be safe when it is so easy for terrorists to sneak through the grove and lob a grenade into his property? The lemon trees must go. So it’s about property, boundaries, rights, history, fences, large imposing fences, safety and also what happens to the little people in this large historical struggle. Riklis said somewhere that one of his inspirations for making the film was hearing the stories of Palestinian people who had taken their legal issues to the Israeli High Court. The article I read said that he thought that was a tribute to the Israeli justice system. Anyone watching the film will have their own views about that.

The film starts with the domestic. Widowed Salma, played by Hiam Abbass, is making preserved lemons. The camera pans in close as she chops the lemons and adds chilli and liquid. It’s a beautiful, intimate scene. Outside there is the clanking of furniture as two men deliver the furniture belonging to the Minister of Defence, confusingly named Israel, into their new house, overseen by his wife, Mira. By morning, a watchtower has been built, overlooking Salma’s grove and soon after, she receives a letter telling her that the trees must be cut down.

The plot around the receipt of the letter is particularly poignant. The letter is in Hebrew so she can’t read it. She must go to a Palestinian café to have it translated and we see her entering the all-male café, the resultant hush in the room, the offhand treatment from the Palestinian men who are drinking coffee, who let her know that she will lose her trees and also, that she must not accept the compensation offered by Israeli authorities – “We don’t accept their money.” Salma is alone.

Hiam Abbass’ portrayal of this woman is one of the most interesting things about the film. Abbass has a very beautiful strong face and it’s just wonderful seeing an older woman in a really strong role. She conveys strength, hurt, resilience and yearning so so well. I loved watching her. Riklis said that one of the reasons he made this film was his desire to find a good role for this actress – may she be in many more films. Terrible things happen to Abbass but I never felt emotionally manipulated by the film-maker. I felt for her without thinking of her as a victim because she does fight back against the order to lose her lemon grove.

At one stage, in court, she says ”I am a real person” and this is possibly the crux of the larger message; that for too long, people on both sides of this debate have demonised each other. The film also explores the experiences of Mira, the wife of the Minister. Both women are lonely; both have children in the United States and have seemingly little in their lives apart from their respective work. We sympathise with both women who have little power or input in the larger politics of this world.

The ending is particularly dramatic so I won’t give it away. It’s really powerful as a metaphor for what is happening in Israel at present. Maybe it’s naff to think about that Seekers song – “the fruit of the poor lemon – it’s impossible to eat” but somehow that fits with the ending. The fruit of this particular conflict does no one any favours. And is not likely to in the immediate future.

Forget after watching?

I went to see the latest Coen brothers film, Burn After Reading, with my 16 year old niece. I find it impossible to resist the Coens even after No Country for Old Men which I hated. And had I written this review that Friday night immediately after watching the film, my comments would be a little different.

The film sets up 2 inept employees of a gymnasium, who seek to blackmail an ex-CIA man, John Malkovich, who is having marital problems. It is a kind of black comedy farce with Brad Pitt playing, with a lot of skill, one of the hopeless blackmailers and Frances McDormand, the other. Pitt is really funny; I liked him far more in this film than in anything else I’ve seen him in. And on the surface, that is what it is; a comedy filled with mostly unlikeable characters with the regular sprinkling of surprising violence. The Coens always do good dialogue, like Tarantino, and there are scenes in the film which are very funny.

George Clooney features as a philandering diversion and creator of the most bizarre sex aid I’ve seen in any movie (porn included – in fact it’s the 15 year old boy part of the Coen brothers on display here. They obviously couldn’t help themselves). The Coens said that idiocy was a major central theme of Burn After Reading; Joel Coen said he and his brother have "a long history of writing parts for idiotic characters" and described Clooney and Pitt's characters as "dueling idiots". Pitt said of his role, "After reading the part, which they said was hand-written for myself, I was not sure if I should be flattered or insulted". He also said when he was shown the script, he told the Coens he did not know how to play the part because the character was such an idiot: "There was a pause and then Joel goes...'You'll be fine.'"

Tilda Swinton, who plays the wife of the Malkovich character, described Burn After Reading as a kind of monster caper movie, and said of the characters, "All of us are monsters – like, true monsters. It’s ridiculous." She also said, "I think there is something random at the heart of this one. On the one hand, it really is bleak and scary. On the other, it is really funny. ... It's the whatever-ness of it. You feel that at any minute of any day in any town, this could happen."

I laughed a bit but found the violence abrupt and unexpected. It also took out the only characters with any pretensions to likeability in the film. But I was entertained. And also entertained by the idea of calling the review ‘Forget after watching…”

And then I heard Julie Rigg and others talking about the film on “Australia Talks Movies”. Several callers made points that I wish I’d thought of. “John from Brisbane” provided the most interesting perspective of the conversation. He said that he felt it was a Coen Brother classic, that it was a very serious film. The central character, McDormand, has superficial obsessions about her appearance which ultimately have really horrible consequences for the characters around her. He said that he felt that the film is warning us about what society is coming to, that our feelings of emptiness or uneasiness at the end of the film are because of the self-centredness of the characters, the moral emptiness of their decisions and the fact that no one can find love in the film. We are reminded of this on several occasions in the film as the camera returns to the location in a park where people wait to meet their Internet dates, strung out on park benches as other people wander along wondering if that man on that bench will be the person of their dreams.

"John from Brisbane" went on to talk about how the CIA is positioned; an organisation usually associated with menace seems out of its depth, on the back foot. Ruth Hessey, another contributor to the Radio National program, spoke about the film reflecting “the paranoia of the modern world” that may mean it ages well. In fact, we live in a society where people are more and more accessible - the film opens with a great zooming shot as Google Earth pans down from on high into CIA headquarters, but increasingly people are less and less connected and more fragmented. It suggests that we have lost touch with what is important but hang on desperately to the magic wand of things like cosmetic surgery to change our lives and bring us joy.

I began to see the film differently - the Radio National comments have made it less forgettable and I am grateful for this.

Rabbit, Run

What comes to mind when you think about the characteristics of a rabbit? For me the quality of timidity is uppermost so when John Updike talks about using the rabbit as a metaphor for his young protagonist in Rabbit Run, it’s not quite what I expected.

Rabbit, AKA Harry Angstrom, is 26. He feels like his life has already peaked. As Updike puts it; “You get the feeling you’re in your coffin before they’ve taken your blood out.” At school Rabbit was a basketball star but now he is a has-been, earning a living demonstrating a kitchen appliance, married to a girl who he feels little for and father of a child who figures little in his thinking.

It’s a brave book because the main protagonist is so rarely likable and we develop sympathy for, but no strong liking for most of the rest of the cast of characters. It’s a book written by a young man, about the life of a young man who is filled with impulse and a yearning for something that he can’t even articulate but it’s something like “Life’s gotta be better than this.”

The first part of the novel is a road movie. It feels like a movie, the camera sliding all over the place under a big starry sky and Rabbit ventures further out beyond his comfort zone although it is clear that the “comfort zone” of the town of Brewer is now a discomfit zone for him. I was scared reading it; I so wanted Harry to go home. He was so adrift in the universe and consequently ungrounded and vulnerable. Eventually he returns to Brewer but not to his wife and child. He hooks up with the first woman he meets, Ruth. He is hapless rather than opportunist but frustrating. I waited for him to begin to miss his little boy but 100 pages go by without a moment’s reflection about his son. John Updike said that he wrote Rabbit, Run in response to Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and tried to depict "what happens when a young American family man goes on the road – the people left behind get hurt.”

The novel is also brave, for the time period, in the way it depicts the character Ruth, who, of course, is the character I most responded to. She struggles to identify what is good for her and to stand up for herself; Updike depicts her internal battles really well even though she gets only a limited amount of time in the book. Harry is dangerous and even though she is pregnant, she does not readily let him back into her life. I found myself desperately wanting them to get together but this would be such a bad deal for Ruth. Harry is a very bad bargain. Why did I want this “happy ending”? The following sentence says it all – Ruth has told Harry that she is pregnant to him and that she thinks he would be bad news back in her life and yet there seems to be a slim opening – and all he can think about is food; “He nervously felt her watching him for some sign of resolution inspired by her speech. In fact he has hardly listened; it is too complicated and, compared to the vision of a sandwich, unreal.”

Updike's novel is noted as being one of several well regarded, early usages of the present tense. Updike stated that "in Rabbit, Run, I liked writing in the present tense. You can move between minds, between thoughts and objects and events with a curious ease not available to the past tense. I don't know if it is clear to the reader as it is to the person writing, but there are kinds of poetry, kinds of music you can strike off in the present tense." He also writes “At one point Rabbit is literally lost, and tears up a map he cannot read; but the present tense, to me as I began to write it, felt not so much ominous as exhilaratingly speedy and free – free of the grammatical bonds of the traditional past tense and of the subtly dead, muffling hand it lays on every action. To write “he says” instead of “he said" rebellious and liberating in 1959.”

I very much like Updike’s prose as well as his exploration of the domestic. American society is undergoing a quiet revolution but Rabbit, Run is preoccupied with the struggle with domesticity, with the familiar, the unsexy, the predictable, the honest, the true, the respectable. And maybe that’s what the larger changes in US society are about too but they don’t impinge on this novel except that we can see, from the contrast in generations, from the aging Springers and Angstroms, from Coach Tothero, that the next generation is yearning for something different.

His prose? Here is another example ”He comes onto the porch to find the boy between his grandmother’s legs, his face buried in her belly. In worming against her warmth he has pulled her dress up from her knees and their repulsive breadth and pallor, laid bare defensively, superimposed upon the tiny gamely gritted teeth the boy exposed for him, this old whiteness strained through this fine mesh, make a milk that feels to Eccles like his own blood.” (p136) David Boroff, in a review written in 1960, described it as “a tender and discerning study of the desperate and the hungering in our midst.” Updike is perhaps a little soft on Rabbit but he was young too when he wrote it.

I read a lot of the "Rabbit" books in my early 20's and it's a great pleasure coming back to them: I am hungry for the next one.

Is 'Towelhead' a wet dream?

Just lately teenage sexuality has been in the news. Art and teenage sexuality. And it was impossible for me to watch the film Towelhead without being constantly reminded of Bill Henson’s controversial image of a pubescent girl. Both the film-maker and the photographer produced similar images of their respective young girls; backlit with a halo of light framing long dark hair, the face gazing uncertainly and indirectly, the mouth slightly open and moistened in the archetypal porn shot. (I have always thought that people who don’t close their mouths as a matter of course look a little half-witted but idiocy is possibly vaguely erotic for some people too). Henson says that he is interested in examining the awkwardness and awareness of change on the part of adolescents. Film director Alan Ball is interested in the same territory.

It’s difficult territory to negotiate without tripping into the voyeuristic or exploitative zone. There’s a kind of undefined fine line. I love a lot of Henson’s work but the photo which caused all the controversy triggered a memory for me of being invited, along with my father, to visit the house of a man we met at a BBQ. He wanted us to go there to see his paintings; which were of semi-nude women painted on black velvet. They were trashy rather than exploitative but the situation was weird and sleazy and our combined good manners (Dad’s and mine) had trapped us in this social situation which we both knew, in advance, was going to be sleazy and weird. I was angry with Dad that he didn‘t find a way of avoiding it and protecting me from what was an embarrassing but non-traumatic social encounter; I was about 16 at the time. So I think there are times when Henson crosses the line. And so does Towelhead.

I came to this film with a bit of a bias; I am part of the 2 % of the population who did not love American Beauty which was also written, but not directed by Alan Ball. His new film, Towelhead, aims to explore what happens to Jasira, a Lebanese-American teenager, in the first weeks of her stay with her father. I liked this description of it, by Roger Ebert:

"It tells the story of Jasira (Summer Bishil), a 13-year-old Lebanese-American girl with an obsession about her emerging sexuality. Well, all 13-year-olds feel such things. That's why so many of them stop talking to us. They don't know how to feel about themselves."

I thought part of Towelhead was brave. I can’t remember seeing a bloody tampon on screen before. Menstruation, and the embarrassments associated with menstruation, get a fair work-out. We experience this through the main character Jasira, a 13 year old girl, who, in the opening of the film, is sent to live with her father because her mother’s boyfriend is way too interested in her. The other brave part of the film is the scenes of Jasira maturbating. We are much more likely to see teenage boys jerking off than acknowledge the private sexual activity of teenage girls.

This is also the film’s downside because this is the extent of what we discover about Jasira and the other teenagers in the film; they are sexual creatures. I think the problem for the film is two-fold; the range of the actress (Summer Bishil) is quite limited and the script is solidly focussed on sex in a range of permutations. Even when she makes friend with a girl, the plot centres around them playing sexy dress-ups for a photographer. “Enough already!” I wanted to scream. I get it! We are surrounded by soft porn and so are our kids. During the Henson debate, I thought mostly about the large soft porn posters which adorn the DFO outlet in Spencer St; enormous images of young semi-clad girls lounging in poses as if they might just be about to give head. Advertising jeans or shoes. I hate them and hate the idea that my nieces might think that this is how women should be. I get it! Why are we banging on about Henson rather than these horrible advertisements?

However, if Jasira is objectified by the men in the film, I think that she is also objectified by the film maker. She never becomes more than a one dimensional character. We never really get to know what she is like. The film does not engage with her personality (and this is what I think it has in common with American Beauty - the women are one-dimensional). Terrible things happen to Jasira and we are no closer to knowing what she is like except that she is not a victim. Alan Ball describes the sexual assault as “A profound moment in two lives devoid of profound moments”. Calling it profound is just the wrong word and indicates something about his view of women and sex that is astray, even if I agree with his assertion that it’s “so important to see that it was a complicated issue, that as a character, Jasira was curious, that she was experiencing some sensations that were pleasurable, that she was getting the kind of attention where she was feeling intimate with somebody which was sorely lacking in the rest of her life.”

And is it interesting that both artists interested in the exploring the implications of the emerging sexuality of young girls are men? Possibly. Henson photographs pre-pubescent and teenage boys and girls. American Beauty and Towelhead both left me feeling uncomfortable. What would a woman film director make of the theme of emerging adolescent sexuality? I can’t think of any films in this category - some suggestions would be good.

Not everyone agrees with me - this opinion from Paul Byrnes in the SMH is interesting, but I think he misses the limited chracter devlopment of Jasira:

Alan Ball is careful to film the sexual sequences for maximum dramatic effect and minimal exposure of the actress's body - but that isn't going to save him from the stockade. One of his big crimes here is to show Jasira as active, rather than a victim. I suspect her progress towards self-awareness is part of what attracted the likes of Collette to the cast. Jasira becomes stronger through her ordeal; it doesn't destroy her, as it might in a movie-of-the-week. As confronting as the movie is, I saw it as hopeful and a caution, but I admit I'm biased towards freedom of expression.

And finally, plumbing. In a film where a lot of the action seems unconvincing, two parts of the plot hinge on bad plumbing in two houses. It might be a new housing estate but come on!

In deep waters

Been reading Tim Winton's early novel Shallows. Been wondering about the impact of being a copper's son - how it affects your childhood and how much it has impacted the content of his writing.

In terms of Shallows - I tried this haiku about it:

Tim is deeply suspicious
of small towns, especially
Ones where men hunt whales.

More later.

In Burgess

“What d’ya reckon ‘In Burgess’ would be like?” In Burgess… I was in the queue at the Sun cinema to go see In Bruges. I looked around to see who it was who was asking the question. I wanted to say “It’s Bruges (pronounced Brooooje) actually” but this isn’t correct either. It’s only pronounced like this in the English speaking world. If you are really “in Bruges”, I think I recall the pronunciation as “Broogger”. It’s a complicated thing. It’s a thing which you can so easily get wrong and something which becomes a marker of who you are and where you’ve been.

Which is sort of what the film is about. The two main characters are trying to lay low in the tourist-filled medieval town of Bruges in Belgium because one of them, Ray, has done something really horrible. They both do horrible things for a living but one character, Ken, is more accustomed to the personal impacts of his chosen career as a hired killer.

We follow Ray and Ken around the medieval churches as Ray tries to come to terms with what he has done. Paintings of medieval views of purgatory and of the last day on earth form the backdrop for both men. Is it possible to find redemption when you have committed an evil act? What’s the place of hell and heaven? What happens if you’re only a little bit bad? The director counter-balances the scenes of medieval Europe with a sort of modern, sometimes comic nastiness. We meet a young drug dealer and her skinhead boyfriend. A guns dealer who works out of a cornucopia of antiques and fine arts. A cocaine sniffing dwarf and his Dutch prostitute. Modern life looks pretty dissolute. There’s a film within a film construct enables the film to include a large number of people dressed in fantasy costumes with animal masks or animal heads; these people appear and reappear at the periphery like a version of a bachannale gone wrong. The only ‘normal’ person we meet is the owner of the hotel where Ray and Kenny stay. She provides a kind of moral pivot for the range of strange activities around her.

And in a funny way, the two bad men do as well. The film explores notions of honour, integrity and loyalty through the two main characters and supporting actor Ralph Fiennes. The difficult choices made by all three characters stem from the strict moral codes which they were born into. It feels strange using the term “moral codes” to describe their thinking but all three have clear ideas about good and evil and about how you treat people which are as much a moral code as mine and maybe not too far away; it’s just that I am not in the habit of killing people. So it’s sort of interesting to position this type of Sopranos thinking in Bruges, with its facade of medieval trappings.

It’s not a great film but not a terrible one either. There is some great, laugh out loud comic dialogue. The shoot-out scenes need work. One reviewer called it “Mr. McDonagh’s modest bag of tricks”. He’s right. The film doesn't quite work because Bruges is not a place of brooding medieval nastiness but a more sterile and tidy tourist town. It needed to be set in a slightly edgier place, maby St Petersburg; a place which combines tourism and a dark Russian underbelly(by all accounts, I haven't been there).

But I liked being back in Bruges. I spent some time in Bruges about 15 years ago. I remembered chocolate shops, extreme tidiness and fruit-flavoured beer. It was a tourist construct; full of shops for the well-heeled and opportunities for culture. I hadn’t remembered any of the churches and so, when I re-read my dairy of the trip last night, I wasn’t surprised to see the phrase “I am sick of churches”. I bet we didn’t go into any of them. We did go into a tower where a lot of the film action takes place; I have written “We climbed lots of stairs because there is supposed to be a great view but the 70-odd people in front of us at the top made it difficult to appreciate.” We went on two excellent tours; one on bikes around the city and out into the countryside and a whole day bus tour to explore World War 1 battle sites which was a highlight of our time in Europe. We stayed in a smelly youth hostel outside of the beautiful old town and bought expensive but divine chocolates. We felt like outsiders because all of the old city felt like a construct. And because it was expensive. Just as the two hit men feel like outsiders. But not my friend in cinema queue who doesn't know what she doesn't know and therefore doesn't know about her outsiderness (if that's a word).

In Bruges, we rested. We had not quite enough money to really enjoy everything. We learnt how to pronounce Bruges…But we might have been in Burgess…

Netherland Part 11

Spring is coming to Melbourne and with it the great treat it is to sit outside in the sun and read for a few hours. On Friday I finished Netherland in the back garden with the jasmine about to go gangbusters and the cat lurking, a bit scared of the new crop of stray cats that have suddenly appeared with the warmer weather.

As I said in an earlier post, I loved going to bed to read this book. It’s set in the context of 9/11 in New York and a lot of reviewers have fixated on this but it seems to me that the novel is as much or more about the micro – about narrator Hans van den Broek and the wake up call that occurs in his life. In that way, 9/11 is a kind of large metaphor. How it works is this; after 9/11. Hans’ wife Rachel takes herself and their baby back to her country of birth, England. It has freaked her out; she doesn’t feel safe. Hans is left behind, renting an expensive apartment in the famous old Chelsea Hotel. “Over half the rooms were occupied by longterm residents who by their furtiveness and ornamental diversity reminded me of the population of the aquarium I’d kept as a child.” It’s appropriate for him to be living in this sort of zoo; he is totally disconnected from his environment, family and sense of what is important.

I think women love stories about hapless men like this. Hans does futures predictions for the money market so even his job is totally disconnected from any sort of reality. I just wanted him to get himself sorted. In reality, I am not attracted to haplessness at all – I seem to like competent men who can do practical things. Hans would be extremely annoying.

He is the archetypal outsider. He is Dutch but has lived in London and now New York. He has no living family. He plays cricket which has got to be an outsider’s game in the Netherlands as it is America. His presence in the novel is matched by another outsider, Chuck Ramkissoon who is from Trinidad. He is a businessman who dabbles in dodgy deals as well as providing kosher sushi to the residents of Long Island. Chuck subscribes to the American dream – If you build it, they will come. He’s full of schemes. And subscribes to the mythology of cricket – we meet him when he intervenes when a gun is brandished at a cricket match with a lecture about the civilising impact of cricket.

And while the novel spends some time on cricket, it is really about family and identity. One of the most moving scenes in the novel is when Hans stalks his far-away son and wife via Google Earth, tracking down to the roof line of their house, searching for signs of life; signs that he was part of their life and signs of their abandonment of him. We can be increasingly in pixilated contact with anyone but how do we really make contact or have intimacy? Which is the real story of the book. For the greater part of the book, Hans has more contact with Chuck than with anyone else in his life. It’s a novel about a man finding out what is important. Let me give an example of how he writes about this:

“…our dealings, however unusual and close, were the dealings of businessman. My ease with this state of affairs no doubt reveals a shortcoming on my part, but its the same quality that enables me to thrive at work, where so many of the brisk, tough, successful men I meet are secretly sick to their stomachs about their quarterlies, are being eaten alive by bosses and clients and all-seeing wives and judgemental offspring, and are, in sum, desperate to be taken at face value and very happy to reciprocate the courtesy. This chronic and I think, peculiarly male strain of humiliation explains the slight affection which bonds so many of us, but such affection depends on a certain reserve. Chuck observed the code, and so did I; neither pressed the other on delicate subjects.” (p158)

The novel is also about identity. The title reminds us that this area of the United States was originally called New Netherland. Wikipedia says that “New Netherland has left a profoundly enduring legacy on both American cultural and political life. Perhaps most significant was the impact of cultural and religious tolerance which led to a wealth of diversity in New Amsterdam.” The attack on 9/11 is partly about the politics of identity, about demonisation, about marginalisation. About being outsiders. Young disconnected men.

Hans is a global citizen; the anchors of family are gone, he can work anywhere. Information and culture have been globalised. In an interview, the author, who has Irish and Turkish heritage, who grew up in the Netherlands and Britain, who works in New York said that half way through writing it, he realised that the plot is the same as The Great Gatsby. He said that it’s about “...saying goodbye to Gatsby, Gatsby lived in an America which no longer exists”. It pays homage to the great tradition in American novels and political life – the dream. And thinking about the language used around the current US elections, the notion of the American dream is still so potent. If it were a tag cloud, it would be huge. For both Obama and McCain. Its worth looking at the American cover of the book - a pastoral idyll and comparing it with the one I bought. They tell very different stories. On my cover, there is a cropped image of someone, probably male, skating. It may be on thin ice or it may reference the more nostalgic parts of Hans' childhood. It's edgy and energetic in a way that the US cover is not.

Finally the writing. Dwight Garner, writing for the International Herald Tribune says that O’Neill is “incapable of composing a boring sentence or thinking an uninteresting thought,...(e.g.)he's writing about dating ("We courted in the style preferred by the English: alcoholically")”. Like me he really loved the book but O'Neill's style won’t be for everyone. “But here's what "Netherland" surely is: the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we've yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell.”

Another columnist, Sean O'Hagen, has written an interesting article about the novel and its fascination with cricket - it's worth reading it just for his list of great novels which are about sport. He says it recalls "John Updike's paeans to basketball that run like an elegy for lost youth, and lost Americal innocence, through his epic series of Rabbit novels." It made me remember the great passsages in Couples; the Sunday afternoon basketball matches where everything seems to be at stake in a way that it NEVER would be for Hans. Where is his testosterone?

For me, it’s about the desolation of life, of relationship, of work which has no meaning or value. Desolation in Nether nether land…

And finally, to amuse myself before I went to sleep, I made a haiku - seems a bit naff to include it here but hey - it's my blog.

Post 9/11

Hans foolishly substituted

Cricket for marriage.

HEY YOU. The living!

The lasting legacy of the film festival has been a snobby disdain for ordinary films. So yesterday, I ventured off to see the Swedish film You, the living with my fabulous film festival friend (FFFF). We had to see it because David Stratton described it as a ”must for serious cinema buffs” or words to that effect. We were in search of something different; beyond “nice little films”.

You, the living is a sort of shout of a title. It’s in your face in a way that the film is not. It’s demanding something of us. “Hey you” – it’s saying. “Take some notice. This is important.” Because the opposite is what – we, the dead? It comes from Goethe: “Be pleased then, you, the living, in your delightfully warmed bed, before Lethe's ice-cold wave will lick your escaping foot.” Early in the film a tram pulls up. Its destination is "Lethe". People spill out and the tram moves on. I knew that Lethe meant “forgetfulness” but Wikipedia also says "In Classical Greek, Lethe literally means "forgetfulness" or "concealment". It’s related to the Greek word for "truth", meaning "un-forgetfulness" or "un-concealment". In Greek mythology, Lethe is one of the several rivers of Hades: those who drank from it experienced complete forgetfulness." In the film’s context, I think it means “Don’t forget you are alive, be alive to the ephemeralness of our condition. Get off the tram!” Or maybe that’s just my current take on things.

Certainly the other part of the quote is at odds with much of the activity in the film. There is little in the film to suggest “delightfully warmed bed”. It’s shot in a limey institutional green; the interiors of houses, street scenes, bars and deserted office foyers tinged in a brooding green sepia. I loved the colour; it created a consistent link between the 50 vignettes of the film and added to the impression that I had of floating like a dust mote through the film. There is no grand plot although one reviewer I read quoted film maker Roy Andersson as saying the film is “about the vulnerability of human beings”.

I warmed to the film over time. Early scenes, such as a surreal china-smashing, execution-causing vignette seemed to try too hard; I was reminded of Monty Python but not in a good way. Similarly a singing scene where a son puts the hard word on his father for cash. And yet other much more ordinary scenes seemed filled with the pathos of being alive. The overweight woman with the beautiful mouth feels ugly and depressed. Nothing her partner can do or say will make her feel better. She tells him to piss off; we’ve all been there. The psychiatrist is tired of working with people who can’t be happy; they are mean at heart. The film allowed you thinking space; I floated off thinking about a friend whose middle name is schadenfreude. (I saw her recently and I was struck with how tiring it is to be with her because of her meanness.) The lack of a strong plot line allowed space for a much more significant personal interaction with the film while it was screening.

And the most beautiful scene for me is the wedding dream. A young girl tells the bar crowd “I dreamt that I married Micke” (the lead guitarist in a band). Her dream is the culmination of a series of fantasies about Micke and an actual meeting. Every teenager has had the “meet the rock star” gauche moment or has dreamt of it. Her post wedding fantasy has a lyrical beauty about it, she gorgeous in wedding dress, opening presents, he wedded to guitar, playing lovely, lovely music. The scene morphs into a surreal train journey and they pull into a station to be greeted by an adoring crowd. But also as Naomi, my FFFF pointed out, underneath the lyricism is a reality; he is much more in love with himself, his guitar and the crowd (in that order) than her so the relationship is pretty doomed.

I was reminded of many of the European films I saw in the 70s. I think the connection is the interest in the surreal and in the disturbance of the surburban veneer to uncover both the ordinariness and the vulnerability of the human condition. One wonderful scene illustrates this. A man is on a balcony as night falls. Across from him, through a window, we can see the tail-end of a bizarre silly scene that we, the film watchers have been up close to prior to this scene but the watcher seems largely oblivious to it. From another room, we hear his wife asking ”What are you thinking?” He is smoking. Not thinking, smoking. And probably scratching his balls. Again she pleads “What are you thinking?” We know that he is thinking of nothing, just daydreaming with his cigarette. She is seeking to connect. He is not deliberately evasive; just not on her wavelength. And she not on his. The human condition.

I thought a lot of Bunuel while I was watching the film and was pleased to read a similar thought in a review by Philip French in The Observer: “Some years later, after marrying a Swede, I gave myself a crash course in Scandinavian culture that revealed a conventional wisdom claimed not to exist - the Scandinavian sense of humour. This is a mordant, quirky, melancholic affair, exhibited by that archetypal malcontent Hamlet, and to be found in, among others, Ibsen, Hans Andersen, Strindberg, Bergman, Astrid Lindgren and Frans G Bengtsson's wonderful adventure novel The Long Ships. Both movies (he means this and Andersson’s third film) are tragicomedies. If they belong in an artistic tradition, it would be Surrealism or the theatre of the absurd and their particular affinities are with Buñuel and Ionesco.”

Lovely to see a film, even though I was irritated by parts of it, that let you float in a river of associations and feelings. It’s Andersson’s fourth in four decades; he is 64 and maybe that’s where Lethe’s ice-cold foot finds real bite.

Animating animation?

Is it a problem if a film, which is about terror and persecution and alienation, is also visually entrancing? When you sit there semi-glued, thinking that almost any scene would look good and/or striking, as a greeting card? I went to see the film Persepolis with my niece Grace. It is the story of a young Iranian girl who grows up in the time of the Shah in Tehran to left wing parents who live with some fear of persecution; relatives are in jail and have been tortured. The main character, Marjane, is bolshie and vulnerable when the revolution comes because of her outspokenness. As a teenager, she is sent to Vienna to school and thus begins a complex time in her life.

Like any outsider, she finds it hard to make friends and this is complicated by the fact that she finds it hard to organise a sympathetic place to live. One review I read said that the writer, Marjane Satrapi, is setting up Europe as hospitable on the surface but, in contrast with Iranians, there is no real sense of community and when the chips are down… Well home is better, whatever the politics. This sentiment is sort of belied by the ending and my sense that the dichotomy is false. An outsider in any society can have a pretty alienating time. And Marjane has an extreme reaction to some of the events, which take place in Europe.

The film provides a brief political history of the last 30 years in Iran, with a particular focus on what happens to women. It is great – really accessible, especially for my 15-year-old niece who is pretty savvy. But you don’t need to be really savvy to get it.

What I struggled with ultimately was the form of the film. It’s animated. It’s incredibly stylish to look at in its black and white simple 60’s style drawings. We see the white jasmine from the bra of Marjane’s wise old grannie tumble out of her clothes as she undresses. The flowers float across the screen like something out of a 60's film in a San Francisco park. A jail appears like the haunted house on the hill. Marjane’s unfaithful Austrian lover morphs from a handsome (in a polo-necked tosser-ish sort of way) to a snaggle-toothed user as she comes to see him more clearly. Lines on lines of men march in protest against the Shah, then we see one mown down by rifle fire. He crumples gracefully and we know that the seeping black is blood but it lacks the emotional impact, which we should feel when we see people being blasted away. Or is this too ubiquitous an image now? I went to see the film Battle for Haditha at the film festival. In this film, many civilians are killed by soldier’s rifle fire as they are in Persepolis. Like the latter film, its based on real events but one is chilling in the extreme and one is not. I think the animation serves to distance us from the events and feelings on screen. I can’t quite rid myself of the sense that this is, after all, a cartoon. Perhaps this is generational but when I asked Grace about it, I think she felt the same way. One of her loves is the films of filmmaker Hiyeo Miyazake – I really like his work as well. But his subject matter is much more playful and suitable for the animation genre. I feel like an old person as I write this. I like The Simpsons; it’s a clever piece of work but I don’t watch it addictively. Something in me finds the genre wanting.

I really enjoyed the film. It’s told from the heart and we are with Marjane every step of the way. I’ve just had to work a bit harder and more consciously to feel the intensity of the events that the director is interested in.

Netherland Part 1

"It was possible, too, I further speculated, that a father might have done the trick – that is, an active, observable predecessor in experience, one moreover alert to the duty of handing down, whether by example or word of mouth, certain encouragements and caveats; and even now, when I am beginning to understand the limits of the personal advice business, I am led to consider, especially when I stroll in Highbury Fields with Jake, a skateboarding boy of six these days, what I might one day transmit to my son to ensure that he does not grow up like his father, which is to say, without warning." Have a look at this. It's a 106 word sentence. I think it might be the longest one in the book but I selected it almost randomly when I was reading page 87 of Netherland and started to think about Joseph O'Neill's prose.

It has divided people that I know, one woman saying that it the next Gatsby ( and there could be no higher praise than this from her) and another saying that she really disliked it. I look forward to going to bed with Mr O'Neill. I love his character Hans and I think he is deliberately using this very careful circuitous Henry James type prose to set up Hans as a real Dutchman. It may be stereotypical but it works for me. He is a man to whom things happen, perhaps because he is bogged down by semi-colons, dashes, and colons. Actually not colons - no lists, just a lot of phrases that imply a certain predisposition.

On the weekend I also saw a film about a scenario which is the opposite of the one which Hans finds himself in. The film is Margot at the Wedding. Margot is the fraying at the edges older sister who comes to"celebrate" her sister's wedding. At one stage her sister says to her "Margot, when your sense of self hinges on your fuckability and that begins to wane, it's very hard." Margot is having a slightly ungrounded affair with a guy who is pretty horrible. Its a great statement and sort of made the film for me though I liked a lot about it. I also liked watching the interview with the director. He talked about how the film has almost no establishing shots so we are pivoted right into the uncomfortable family situation without much warning. Its a really effective idea. A lot of the action is seen indirectly or a characters head is cut off and we just see his or her body moving round the room like you are sitting on the couch or something. It works in such a different way to Netherland where a lot of the time we live in Hans' head.

Film Word Cloud

Check out what my musings on film have turned into on Wordle.

Boy A

What do we do with children who commit horrible crimes? I started thinking about this earlier this week apropos of the court case where 4 young men from Melton belted up a Sudanese boy. They embodied everything that is unseen about the underbelly of this society; racist, largely unrepentant, low levels of schooling and likely to breed way more kids than anyone in my bubble of acquaintance. The barrister representing one of them reckoned that he should be excused a jail term because his poor access to schooling had left him bereft of a value structure! I really don’t know what should happen in cases like this. One writer to The Age suggested that these boys should be sent to the Sudan to experience a community where schooling is really hard to access!

I saw the English film Boy A last night. It’s won some awards and will probably get a commercial release. It follows the experiences of a young man, in his early 20s, who has just been released from jail after committing some sort of horrible crime. We don’t find out immediately, which creates a level of tension and interest that combines with the tension and interest as to whether ‘Jack’ is going to be able to survive with a new identity in a new town.

He is likeable. The actor Andrew Garfield, does a fantastic job of playing this young guy who has missed out on some of the key milestones in a teenager’s life and doesn’t know how to behave. He is shy and gawky and easy to like but all the time, you’re wondering what he did and what will befall him. The film is also about families; ‘Jack’ is supported by a parole officer with a son of about the same age. To some extent, the film is about the old Philip Larkin ‘They fuck you up…’ riff. Fathers and sons. Abuse. To what extent can you use your family (or poor schooling) as an excuse for your behaviour. It’s a well-told story but I am no closer to having any idea what should happen to those Melton boguns…

Slow burn of embarrassment

“As I get older, I want life to slow down a little. Films move too fast. I want to stay in the moment and, if you wait, things reveal themselves.” The film maker is Joanna Hogg and she is talking about her latest film Unrelated which I really loved despite it being a little too long.

Her film is a real achievement given that the main character Anna (Kathryn Worth) is annoying, embarrassing and dumb. Most of the time, I felt irritated with her. A middle aged English woman, she arrives at an Italian villa near Sienna late at night to be greeted by her friend’s daughter and her friends. They are drinking by the pool; the adults have gone to bed. The early part of the film sets up her unease and the fact that she and her absent husband are going through a rocky patch. Anna has been invited to be part of this holiday for this extended family and friends but she seems incapable of connecting with Verena, her friend and gravitates towards the younger generation who are in their late teens or early twenties. The whole extended generational mix reminded me of being at the beach house and of the sort of tensions which arise when you plonk a whole lot of people in the one place for too long an d fuel it with alcohol.

Hogg said in an interview that she deliberately organised the film shoot so that all the actors had to commit to being in the house for about 7 weeks. She shot it consecutively so that the story could emerge organically. Looking at this house and environment, it would be no real hardship to be forced to spend a couple of months there but tensions arise when you live in close proximity to other people for any length of time.

Anna is attracted to Oakley; there are many scenes where I felt the slow burn of embarrassment for her. It was painful to watch but very real. I am most interested in the questions of allegiances in this film. You can watch a trailer which shows the Gen Y kids buying (mostly) alcohol from the supermarket. Anna is trailing along behind with an uncertain look on her face like she’s not really sure if she fits in. (She’s not really sure if she fits in anywhere.) They hoon out to the car with the shopping trolleys and end up in a field smoking a joint. The kids (I know I should write young adults but this denotes my age) boast about getting pissed and rolling round Sienna in the middle of the night pissing on church doors, while Anna looks sort of embarrassed and sort of complicit. Then a silence falls over the group as they realise that she is “not one of them”. “Hey, don’t tell the olds.” And she agrees and that sets up the dramatic tension for a large amount of the film.

We would have liked to have seen more of the olds in the film. Slightly too much time is taken up trailing round after the kids and apart from Anna, the older generation remains largely one-dimensional. But Naomi and I both loved the tag line between Anna and Verena; an awkward and uncomfortable “Hey, let’s get a couple of tickets to an Iggy Pop concert some time.” Which sort of tells us that Anna is still in a pretty ungrounded space, despite what has happened to her in the close confines of this house.

Vulnerability

Wendy and Lucy is the second film I have seen this year that explores life on the road. In both Into the Wild and this film, the perspective is that of a young American going north. I hadn’t been much interested in Into the Wild until a friend told me how much he’d loved it. That film followed the real life of Christopher McCandless who left home after graduating, heading towards Alaska, without telling his family of his plans. His plans. He didn’t seem to have plans, more a sort of disgust about the material and pressured life that seemed to be laid out for him as a young lawyer. In contrast, Wendy (Michelle Williams, Brokeback Mountain) has plans. She is also headed for Alaska, seeking work. The film begins with a long shot- we see her playing with her dog Lucy and humming tunelessly. The long shot feels voyeuristic and sets up the ongoing feeling that people with nastier intentions than the film audience will also be watching Wendy who is young and vulnerable. She is on the margins; the next shot takes us to a campfire of people who are passing though a town on Oregon. It’s a little bit scary but she gets some good advice about possible work in Alaska and is able to move on.

McCandless took on the name of ‘Alexander Supertramp' and shrugged off any trappings of comfort pretty quickly. When his car was wrecked in a flood, he burnt the number plate and all his remaining money and started hitchhiking and jumping trains. What he does is sort of shocking. His journey is set against the background of the most fabulous North American scenery; big skies, rivers, bird and animal life. You get a real sense of the attraction for him of being on the road. In Wendy’s case, she gets stuck in a town in Oregon and we linger with her as things get more and more desperate. In contract to the Supertramp character, her shrinking money is a real issue for her. I could describe the plot in about two sentences so the real skill of the film-maker is in taking time to let us feel her vulnerability and strength of character. I’m really interested, in this MIFF, in films which try to stay with the painful moments for characters, in how film makers create the space for us to feel what they are feeling. I’m not so interested in crying when there is a painful moment as in really being forced to sit in the horribleness of whatever is on the screen and feel it.

The director, Kelly Reichardt, does this in a couple of ways. There is no music to distract or artificially build emotion. The film is slow; we experience Wendy’s panic when she discovers her dog is missing in excruciating slow tension. Wendy is never melodramatic; she is tightly contained, like Supertramp, but so so vulnerable. And the film feels like real life because it is just a fragment from Wendy’s life. I loved the director’s willingness to have us sit with the pain and fear and loneliness of Wendy. It was hard to sit through but very real.

Supertramp’s sister provides part of the narrative voice of Into the Wild; through her comments we hear what the family is going through as their boy has effectively disappeared. The film is quite interested in exploring the pain for the family of his decision to disappear and the extent to which he can no longer really connect with anyone that he meets. Some film footage makes us wonder about his relationship with his parents, particular his father, and to think about what you owe you family in terms of communicating with them. When is it OK to say “enough is enough” and to simply drop out of a family? Is it ever OK? Is it OK to punish the whole family for the sins of some? In Wendy’s case we are exposed to a little of her family but it’s clear that there is a disconnect. We’re left to wonder about what has happened in her life. She and the dog are alone on the road and this small lovely, painful film is also a film about the love which Wendy and her dog share. And about vulnerability and choices – or lack of them. And about making brave choices - It’s a difficult film for dog-owners.

Flipping Out

The director called it “flipping out” but I think of it as post-traumatic stress syndrome. I wonder if there’s a proper and specific term for it in Israel? Yoav Shamir’s documentary is about the experiences of young Israelis post their military service in India. Many go to India to recover from their 3 years of service. When I was in India, they had just decamped in a mass exodus to go south from Dharamsala and other mountain towns and there were huge collective sighs all round from the locals who found them too loud, too miserly and too stoned.

The documentary opens with breakfast scenes around a bong in the northern foothills of India; it explores what happens to those who “flip out” either as a result of prolonged and sustained drug use or because of their experiences of military service or some combination of both. Or maybe neither; one man interviewed spoke of his mother with a mental illness and his fear of inheriting it.

We meet many young Israeli men, some people dedicated to saving lost causes, an Indian woman and an Israeli deputy prime minister. The documentary provoked a long conversation between me and my Israeli-Australian friend. What should be the nature of national service? Can Australians really understand Israel’s plight? Can we understand what it is to need an army? What is the responsibility of government when their citizens are in need abroad? What comparisons could be made with the way that Australians behave in Bali? How should India respond?

We talked at length about the nature of that military service experience. The documentary maker began with a promising through line - footage of young Israeli soldiers on active service. He asked some questions about the nature of their army service but this part of the film petered out after a while. We really don’t know the extent to which young people do “flip out” en masse or whether it’s more isolated. The film made me angry and curious which is a good outcome. What sort of populace do you create when you force your entire cohort of young people through a three year army period. The film alluded to brutalisation and the annihilation of identity without exploring it in any detail. Do you really want to live in a society created in this way? I want to know more about this.

As Naomi reminded me, I have the luxury of thinking this way. She was proud of the Israeli government stepping in to look after these young people through a system of “warm houses”. I can’t imagine feeling anything about an Australian government doing good in this way. I am not very patriotic; maybe because I don‘t have to be but also because I want to live in a society where patriotism and nationalism are not key features.

After the film we walked up the hill towards the Cellar Bar. A couple crossed our path on the way, he in Western clothes and she in a full burka, even with the finest black chiffon across her eyes. I struggle with the fact that gender impacts so much on what some people wear; I’d be fine if he was also swathed in black fabric. The most poignant scene from the film flashed into my head. An Indian woman is being interviewed; really the only time an Indian person is part of the story in any meaningful way. She was the landlady several years prior when a young man called Ran “flipped out”. She describes the impact of the young Israelis in Goa. We see scenes of many, many stoned dancers on the beach against a faint sunrise and pulsing techno music. She recounts a phone call with his parents where he was too stoned to talk to them. Then he shows up. She is clearly nervous but happy to see him but he has changed significantly. He has now found a form of orthodox Judaism that prevents him from touching women so he cannot even shake her hand, even though it's clear that she cared for him when he'd been ill. The scene is stark in the disconnect, he might as well be stoned for all the warmth she receives from him. It’s terribly sad. It adds to my great suspicion of fundamentalist religion.

And so it is a film about nationalism, about caring, about trauma and about young people adrift in another culture with the licence this brings to cut loose. A great film to start the film festival.

Waves

Is it possible for a dramatic moment to go unnoticed amidst the flesh and press of a crowded Mediterranean beach? Director Adrian Sitaris takes us up close and personal in this short Romanian film. A couple fondle each other as their neighbours watch on in cross envy. A young man in baggy underpants is visibly attracted to a young mother. It’s all lust, bustle and sand up your bathers in 16 minutes. But what can you really get away with on a beach? This is an intriguing little film.

Falling in love again. Properly…

“Cloud 9: a state of bliss; in a euphoric state…” At various times in my life I have been on Cloud 9 and at various times I have yearned to be in that strange out-of-body but totally in touch with body state of disconnect with the world. Falling in love – it’s a time when the world goes a bit fuzzy, when you can’t concentrate, when its hard to know what you want except to see that special person. It’s dizzying and unsustainable but totally addictive. German film Cloud 9 focuses on the reactions of Inge, a seamstress in her mid 60’s who falls suddenly in lust and love with Karl who is 76. It’s a love triangle film, one which might be fairly prosaic if it were about younger people. But time is running out for all three and it is this, the performances and the utter ordinariness of the woman and her lover that makes this film really special.

We meet Inge (Ursula Werner) in her bedroom / sewing room in the heat of an East Berlin summer. She is sweaty and dishevelled, her eyes small in her middle-aged puffy face. Within minutes, she is in Karl’s flat, their faces in that classic cinema close-up that presages sex. It’s tender and lustful all at once. We’ve all felt that urgency to have sex; so much wanting it that only half the clothes come off and the feeling afterward too of “What have I done? What am I going to do now?”

Inge has a husband of 30 years, Werner (Horst Hehberg) whose hobby is listening to recordings of vintage steam trains. Their relationship seems firm and strong and for a while, Inge resists taking things further with handsome Karl (Horst Westphal). Then she tells her daughter “I always thought I would fall in love again, properly. I just gave up expecting it.” The word “properly” really got to me. There are degrees of love and I feel lucky that I have been in love “properly” a few times in my life. It was timely to watch this film; it’s easy to give up on the possibility of this happening again. Inge was brave and honest as a character; she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life as she had been living. Karl re-awakened something for her. In love, her face softened and became young again; in one scene, she looked like a nervous, trangressive teenager.

The positioning of this film, within the ‘Forbidden Pleasures' section of MIFF, seemed exploitative to me. A lot of the publicity for the film globally has been of the “check out these old people having sex” variety. The film is a drama, with the appropriate amount of sex present in any love triangle film, however unusual it is to show explicit sex between people of this age. The film deals with all the anxieties and realities of the body as it ages. The young people next to me were clearly uncomfortable with the sex scenes; they laughed or whispered whenever anything approaching a conventional love or sex scene was shown. I wanted to turn and say “this will be you. If you’re lucky” but I didn’t. Perhaps it was a good thing to watch, two weeks after my 50th birthday. Despite part of the storyline, it is a film about seizing the day in the bravest, most honest way you can. And it bravely depicted ordinary people who looked like me and they filled up the screen.

In search of a better life…

I’ve been to Chongqing about seven times. It’s the port city in China where all the tourist boats congregate before and after they ‘do’ the Three Gorges. Chongqing is the fastest-growing urban centre on the planet. Its population is already bigger than that of Peru or Iraq, with half a million more arriving every year in search of a better life.

I’ve only been there in winter when it’s a city of dire cold and fog. Or bad smog. I think there is a bad inversion layer over the place even though it sprawls out over steep hills. It’s the first ritzy city that I encountered in China, after the rural intimacy of Yunnan province. Chongqing is full of skyscrapers and department stores, and of huge billboards flogging French cosmetics. I got a shock when I first went there. In Moijiang where I’d come from, I’d been able to buy a Chinese flag and some left over Red Army gear in modest little shops and not much other merchandise. This was in 1999 though and China has rushed ahead since then in its lurch towards modernisation.

Chinese Canadian film-maker Yung Chang has made a film about this area of the world. And this theme. Called Up The Yangste, he began with the idea of “exploring the culture of tourism and the tourism of culture” on the Yangste river tourist boats before figuring out that the story he was telling was really about contemporary China. I’ve been on one of those tourist boats in non-tourist season. One year I was there, we had an evening tour of the cold old river, mists swirling around and the lights of the city off in the distance. The city actually reminds me of a fabled Tolkein-style fantasy but maybe that’s another story. The evening river tour was pretty dismal. It was about everything that is wrong with organised tourism; artificial jokes, bad music, reality out of sync with promise. But I had no expectations that it would be good and wasn’t paying the 200 or 300 yuan fee. Cynical in the extreme.

Yung Chang’s film is not cynical. It’s a documentary made great by the real life characters in the film. While it starts with the very impersonal fortress like lochs which the Yangste boats must pass through, the bulk of the story is intimate. It tracks the experiences of two teenagers who leave school to begin work on the tourist boat. This is absolutely compelling. Yu Shui is the daughter of a very poor family who squat on the edges of the soon-to-be-flooded Yangste growing corn illegally. They are minority people; the lowest of the low in this society. Yu Shui would like to stay at school but they are too poor; she must make a sacrifice for the possibility of one of hers siblings attending high school in the future. Her grief at leaving and the unexpressed pain of her parents fills the screen; Yung Chang is discreet enough to avoid commentary at these specials moments in the film.

The other character we meet is ‘Jerry’, Chen Bo Yu, whose own words set him up for his fate in the film. “ I am successful because I am good looking and good at English,” he says gleefully at the beginning of the film. An only child, he knows he occupies centre-stage in his parent’s lives. I have not met many Jerrys in my times in China but I’ve met a lot of Yu Shui’s. Maybe it reflects where I’ve been – not in wealthy Beijing or Shanghai schools but in rural western China where circumstances are hard.

I loved the scenes of Yu Shui and her family. Her father carrying their huge wardrobe on his back up the newly made shoulder of the road. The road built with shovels, chisels and wheelbarrows, just as I have seen them building the great highway into Burma. The chiselled cheekbones of Yu Shui’s father and his gaunt worker’s body. The family visiting their daughter on the boat, her Dad still in the soiled clothes of a road worker shuffling into the tacky lounge where tourists are subjected to songs like “How Easy it is to Learn Chinese-sy.” This made me cringe, as did the scene where the mostly Western tourists are taken to inspect the new home of Chinese families whose previous homes have been submerged by the new dam. The Westerners make arch comments about the politics and the Chinese bat these away like slow-pitched balls. It’s painful for me to watch these scenes; it reminds me of many similar experiences in China and of just how hard it is to plough below the surface in another country and to really connect with the people and the issues. Even with the best will in the world.

Up the Yangste does just as the film-maker wanted – it is a real insight into many of the issues in modern China, seen through the very private lens of Yu Shui and other family and other ordinary people, some who cry with anger about what has happened to them. It’s real and raw; as opposed to the cheesy experiences that the Western tourists have as they are transported up one of the longest and most important rivers in the world. (Note that if this whets your appetite for reading about change in China, you can do no better than Peter Hessler’s River Town, an outstanding Westerner’s account of life in a town on the Yangste, or Mr China by Tim Clissold (about doing business in China or Simon Winchester’s great book about the Yangste itself, The River at the Centre of the World.

There is no culture here…

There’s a moment in The Band’s Visit which is painful to sit through; it’s what gives this film traction and lifts it above the general run of the mill cross cultural films. Three Egyptian men in blue uniform are jammed around a dining table with four Israelis. They have gate-crashed a birthday and they are definitely not welcome. In a less interesting film the discussion of music would establish a connection between these disparate individuals. Instead, the conversation goes nowhere. We become aware that the connection even between band members is at best tenuous, let alone the possibilities of connecting across cultures with long-standing issues. The connection between the Israeli couple is fraught and angry; it hints at the despair of long-term unemployment. Their happy wedding photo belies the present loneliness of both individuals. And yet the film is only momentarily about their story. Much of the dialogue takes place in English; a second language for both cultures which creates a further level of stilted alienation.

The film maker, Eran Korilin, said in an interview on At the Movies, "I wanted also the film to have these aesthetics where you would have a very strict and disciplined shooting and cutting but maybe you would feel underneath that there is something pounding, you know, beneath." Something pounding beneath - what an ambition and a phrase.

The band is stranded in the wrong small town in Israel. Their intended destination is Petah Tikwa. My friend Jindra says that this translates as ‘Opening of Hope’. Instead, they are in a fictional town called Beit Hativka; which might well be called “Departure of Hope’ or “Hopelessness”. It is a town perched in the middle of a white sandy desert, its new sparseness accentuated by the empty roads and colonnade of light poles stretching out to nowhere. The director, Korilin, emphasises the surreal nature of the landscape by positioning the band in tight geometric formation, their uniforms very blue against the overexposed grey of the sky. Life there is dismal; as Dina, the café owner points out ”Culture, there is no culture here, no Arab, no Israeli, no culture at all…” It is a town entirely at odds with my experience of the Middle East though the spare desert scenes were like many I saw in Jordan and some in Syria. The setting conveys the same sort of desolation that I feel in new outer-suburban parts of Melbourne. Part of it is the lack of life on the streets and the sense of disconnection that people have from each other.

There is much more to say about this film. It is a fragment of a story but I was engrossed in it. The director avoided both predictability and sentimentality, with the exception of the concerto sub-theme. In its exploration of the loneliness of many of the individuals, it is touching without being sentimental. I could write much more about the two main characters, Dina and Tawfiq, created by actors who both know how to fill a screen.

Wikipedia says that The Band's Visit was Israel's original Foreign Language Film submission for the 80th Academy Awards but was rejected by the Academy because it contained over 50% English dialogue. Thus, Israel sent Beaufort instead; Beaufort was finally included in the five final nominees. I saw Beaufort last year at MIFF; it is a very good film which is also about loneliness and despair against a fairly bleak backdrop. It was rumored, according to Wikipedia, that it was the filmmakers of Beaufort who brought to the Academy's attention the ineligibility, on language grounds, of The Band's Visit. Beaufort's makers denied this rumor. Is it better than The Band’s Visit? Different beasts!