A souffle of strangeness?

Note – Spoiler alert


I’ve seen three films in the last little while with children in lead roles. I Wish, Moonrise Kingdom and Monsieur Lazhar have seemingly little in common apart from this fact – but in each case, the presence of the children invests the film with charm and a fable-like quality that made me put away adult ways (scepticism, hard-heartedness, cynicism).

The Girl’s Own Annual overlay of Moonrise Kingdom was especially appealing. It was beautiful to look at, like a faded Polaroid, or the pages of a picture story book from the 1960s (it was set in 1965). Situated on an island off the coast of New England, two 12 year olds run away from home. This is not a gritty urban runaway story, despite the fact that the boy, Sam, is an orphan living in a foster home, and the girl, Suzy, is unhappy at school and feels misunderstood at home. Each starts out on the adventure with a lot of equipment (she takes a cat in a basket, a portable record player and several hardback books, he carries a pipe and enough camping equipment for a scout troop. The film is highly stylized – reminiscent in look and feel to the new app The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Less more.
Critic Roger Ebert describes it thus: “Anderson always fills his films with colors, never garish but usually definite and active. In "Moonrise Kingdom," the palette tends toward the green of new grass, and the Scout's khaki brown. Also the right amount of red. It is a comfortable canvas to look at, so pretty that it helps establish the feeling of magical realism”  and Peter Bradshaw from the Guardian says: “Where David Lynch finds a dark horror beneath the wholesome exterior, Anderson sees something else — something exotic but practical and self-possessed, a world that ticks along like an antique toy, much treasured by a precocious child. The homes and buildings often look like giant dolls' houses.”

The adult world depicted in all three films is fraught – by relationship issues, war, suicide, loneliness, displacement. And so each film-maker is able to generate a contrast between the adult world and the children’s world – of perspective, of capacity to respond to the world, of tone. Monsieur Lazhar is the bleakest, dealing as it does with suicide, war and refugees. In this film, the children cannot escape these issues and the film is potentially quite dark. We watch it knowing that it can’t (and shouldn’t) end well. What makes it bearable is the relationships created in the classroom between the children and their teacher and his determination to acknowledge and work with the pain they’ve experienced as a group. In this he shows great respect for what children are capable of both feeling and working through.

Koreada, who directed I Wish, showed this kind of respect in Nobody Knows, his 2004 film that focussed on a family of children abandoned by their parents trying to survive in the Tokyo suburbs without adult support. He is a director who is very skilled at working with children. In I Wish, the lead characters are played by two real-life brothers who play brothers separated when their parent’s marriage breaks up. Living in different cities, they miss each other and what the family was and the plot to get the parents back together (the “I wish” of the title). The film is about the wishes and fantasies of children, as all three films are to some extent. There is a sweetness in the story, a humanism and charm in the kids that made me put aside things that I would normally criticise. I liked being in the optimism of the kids’ zone – they thought they could do things, change things. All three films give children a degree of agency, inventiveness and care for each other that is often missing in films about children.

It’s maybe no accident that I’ve connected I Wish and Moonrise Kingdom. Roger Ebert says, of Wes Anderson “In Anderson's films, there is a sort of resignation to the underlying melancholy of the world; he is the only American director I can think of whose work reflects the Japanese concept mono no aware, which describes a wistfulness about the transience of things. Even Sam and Suzy, sharing the experience of a lifetime, seem aware that this will be their last summer for such an adventure. Next year they will be too old for such irresponsibility.”
I could write more, as others have, about the symbolism inherent in Moonrise Kingdom (the coming of the flood, America in a time of innocence (early 60s – innocent – really?) etc etc) but these things weren’t strong factors in the charm of this film for me. Bradshaw says it better than I can: “Anderson's movies are vulnerable to the charge of being supercilious oddities, but there is elegance and formal brilliance in Moonrise Kingdom as well as a lot of gentle, winning comedy. His homemade aesthetic is placed at the service of a counter-digital, almost hand-drawn cinema, and he has an extraordinary ability to conjure a complete, distinctive universe, entire of itself. To some, Moonrise Kingdom may be nothing more than a soufflé of strangeness, but it rises superbly.”

Bleak...

Past the Shallows by Favel Parrett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I started this novel because I’ve just been to Tasmania where it’s set but was immediately filled with a sense of bleakness and found it hard to come to the novel willingly. You know, from the very first pages, that what the characters face is grim and that there may be no redemption or hope. And I won’t spoil the plot to say more about this. What I want to stress about the novel is how good it is.
It’s a debut novel, it’s slight in length and sparingly told. It reminded me of the outset of Cormac McCarthy, because it is about men and boys, but more importantly because it takes no prisoners. Ultimately I couldn’t put it down though I wanted to look away at times. The story revolves around three brothers and their dysfunctional father, a fisherman in the southernmost part of Tassie. In my recent travels there we went on a boat eco tour along the coast – from Adventure Bay down to the seals at the base of the south island. If you go south from there, there’s very little between you and the Antarctic. The water is deep and wild, with big kelp forests, mile long swells, seals and as many albatross as I have ever seen. Bruny Island, along with the Tasmanian mainland, is the setting for this novel and very beautifully described too. We were lucky enough to see it when it was calm, and when it was angry.
The environment is significant to the novel but so are hidden secrets of this small community that emerge during the narrative. I was scared reading it – the father is violent and it reminded me of things that have happened in my own extended family. Of how scary men can be when they drink and are out of control. The writer manages to build our connection with the two young boys who live with their father, even though the prose is sparse. (A minor quibble; I thought the surfing scenes were a little gushy and over lyrical, but I am not a surfer and the writer is. I preferred the way that Malcolm Know wrote about surfing in his recent novel ‘The Life’.) I hope to read more from her.


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The toy soldiers of our emotional armoury

I liked this description of childhood by novelist Craig Sherbourne. He was writing about Sonya Hartnett's new book. I once upset her at a Writers Forum by suggesting that she should write for adults; that she was in some way limiting what she was capable of by doing the YA thing. I didn't express myself very well and she took umbrage on behalf of all teenagers. I think she has now found her adult voice – I really like her writing. This is what Craig said.

“If we didn’t have childhoods we’d be much better people. We’d start out as grown-ups innocent as lambs. We wouldn’t have behind us all those early years of practising vices: greed, duplicity, cruelty, bullying, indolence, vandalism, bullshitting, cronyism, hypocrisy, selfishness, violence. Childhood is where we hone these skills. If by age 14 we haven’t learned how to manipulate our loved ones, we’re backward and doomed to live at the mercy of others. Parents, siblings, schoolmates, schoolteachers – there’s always one we’ve got a crush on and torture with flirting – are the toy soldiers with which we practise emotional warfare.”

Bleak hey? You can read more in The Monthly. My friend Jane and I spent part of yesterday talking about how lucky we were to have the childhoods we have. We both reckon we have less baggage than lots of others because we were much loved and quite well parented… Better tell Dad before I kill him – he is tormenting me at present…

Craig said some other interesting things about Sonya - he reckons she is a hedgehog style writer "Many books, same story", every novel is the "unpeeling of every layer of that vision". I think he's right - wonder how Sonya will respond...