Elles

Elles is the second film I’ve seen this month that focuses, in part, on prostitution. It would be misleading to see this as the sole focus. It’s a subject that’s always going to grab attention but I think the film is really about something else. The main character (Anne) is wonderfully played by Juliette Binoche – I can’t imagine anyone else doing it so well. A middle class journalist, she is writing an article about students who turn to prostitution as a means of getting through uni. The two women that she meets in the course of interviewing for the article present an unexpected view of their work. The Juliet Binoche character is intrigued by both their perspectives and what it throws up about her own life.


There are few reviews of this film yet but mostly I think the reviewers have got it wrong. Read these two snippets:

“While Szumowska and her co-writer, Tine Byrckel, hammer home their arguably offensive theory that well-to-do femmes are acting as hookers in the kitchen and at the keyboard, they seem far less clear on what they want to say about actual harlotry. Scenes of the journalist's collegiate interview subjects satisfying male clients to earn tuition money are lit and shot like perfume commercials, even as the sex in some cases turns disturbingly brutal.” (from Variety)

and (from The Guardian):

“Juliette Binoche gives it her considerable all in this otherwise dubious film, which purports to investigate the moral and emotional price of teenage prostitution…Presumably the idea is to explore the emotional disconnect required to function as one of those can't-be-too-thin French bourgeoises.

I think what the film is about is not the metaphor of prostitution, but of compromise. The Anne character is not economically reliant on anyone. She does not need to prostitute herself, as the students feel they need to do (One compares the work favourably with working in a fastfood restaurant). She could have a viable and interesting life as a working journalist living by herself. The compromise comes in wanting a relationship, in having children, in wanting to work, in being a daughter, in being part of a middle–class mileau. Parts of herself are suppressed in this process – just as parts might also blossom. (A friend of mine said recently of her time as the mother of two very young children: “I feel like I lost myself for about five years.”) I think that’s where the film maker, Malgoska Szumowska is heading. Much of what we see of Anne’s life is unpleasant; her sons are providing little joy and her husband is disconnected and angry. She is frustrated. Not a pretty picture. One effective scene is when she visits her ailing father in hospital. She picks up his foot to give him a foot massage. Lots of feelings went through my head. What a loving thing this is to do. How horrible old men’s feet can be. How difficult it would be for me to massage my own fathers feet. The importance of touch. Its disappearance in life as you age.


You might think that the prostitution would not be pretty either. Szumowska tries to upset expectations here; the two women present their work as one that provides them with choices and as mostly benign. I was reminded very powerfully of Kate Holden’s account of her life as a prostitute Under my skin. I never quite believed that the things she described in that book did not have a substantial impact on her and I felt that with the accounts of the two girls in the film. I think Szumowska intends us to be sceptical observers; there are small cracks in the façade presented by the two girls.


Binoche is authentic and believable – it’s a very powerful film about being a woman.


Black & White & Sex is the other film I’ve seen recently that features sex workers. It’s a new Australian film by John Winter. This film is much more explicitly about the way we view prostitution though, like Elle, it wants to mess with our preconceptions about it. Winter said that he was inspired to make the film after going for a round of institutional funding in relation to another film script which featured a prostitute. The film fund reps were concerned that the portrayal of the sex worker was too upbeat – not “victim” enough. This inspired him to write the script for this, a film in which the sex worker character is played by eight different women (not dissimilar to the portrayal of Bob Dylan in the film I’m not there).


It begins with the feel of a play. Two characters on stage, almost entirely dialogue driven. I wasn’t sure it was going to work for a while, then the character of Angie got going. She reminded me of kids I’ve taught – like half-loved dogs, never quite reliable but yearning for contact. The film covers some great topics: intimacy, censorship, power, gender dynamics, love, control and trust. What happens is unexpected and interesting. It also looks good – shot in black and white, and using split screens where necessary to fragment the focus and force the viewer to make choices about what to look at. The use of eight actresses was clever; giving life to the idea that there are many facets and perceptions within the world of the sex worker; and that that person can embody universal desires and feelings but simultaneously be uniquely individual.


Need to conclude with this snippet from a review – just because I liked the imagery.

“The film industry, so the common wisdom goes, is chocked to the gills with carbon copy cinema, stuffed like a poisoned piñata with the bile and fluid of a zillion regurgitated ideas. Here is a bold, audacious and throbbingly original Australian film, particularly palatable for viewers partial to edgy, intimate and explorative interpersonal dramas.”

Julie Rigg, in commenting on this film, said: “My colleague Jason Di Rosso reckons that Australian directors are not very good at directing sex scenes. We lack a true erotic cinema. What do you think?”
He might be on to something, though I don’t think anyone would argue that the scenes in Black & White & Sex are meant to be sex scenes per se. I can’t think of any Australian films that have the kind of sensuality I’ve seen in some French films or some of Ang Lee’s work for example. The sex scenes in Elles looked real. Real doesn’t always mean erotic but it can. I think what Australians are good at is the flirty Diver Dan kind of schtick – but this is not erotic. There's something in the image of Australian men that refuses the erotic - it might be that you have to take women seriously and risk intimacy. This is at odds with the ways in which masculinity in Australia is traditionally presented on the screen. Maybe I will stop there.

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.

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.