BANG BANG: Durga Chew-Bose

[BANG BANG is our week-long look back at 20!!, or "Twenty-bang-bang," or 2011, with contributions from all over aiming to cover all sorts of enthusiasms from film to music to words and beyond.]

by Durga Chew-Bose

I’ve been especially preoccupied with women this year. My desktop is a cluttered mess of young Michelle Pfeiffers and Diane Lanes, a spitfire-y Linda Manz, a pouty Tatum O’Neal, Elaine May, Gilda, Sissy and Shelley, Karen Black (multiple times), Cher with Winona, and screengrabs of Gena as Minnie. The young mother in Andrea Arnold’s short film, Wasp, is giving me the finger, Haydée Politoff, her back, Geraldine Chaplin and Monica Vitti seduce, smoke…seduce, and Bibi Andersson is beside herself. Marie-France Posier—who in an eerie way, congeals into "Laura Palmer"—is slouched in a bathtub, moon-eyed and fully-clothed, hair braided and boots dangling over the edge like a child who’s not quite sure how she got there or if she wants to get out.

I should probably organize all of these pictures. Or at least drag them into a folder. But what’s the fun in that? I enjoy the distraction; their perpetual orbit, the familiarity. The delight of seeing Chiara Mastroianni and remembering the way she says “Ann-Gé-lah Bah-ssette” when ribbing about Emmanuelle Devos’ butt in Desplechin’s Un conte de Noël. Or even now as I write, on the top right corner of my screen, Diane Keaton’s Kay Adams is smiling: red dress and sun hat, she’s listening as Michael tells her to eat her spaghetti while he spins a story about Luca Brasi.

Barbara Loden’s Wanda aired on TCM in the fall. I watched it twice in a row—the first time completely crushed but immediately devoted; the second time, with a pen and my notebook. I jotted down images and words that drew near in the way some movies—the most pressing ones—appear to come from somewhere itchy inside me. I also copied dialogue; harmless in print, vivid, near wicked on screen. Like how credulously Wanda asks at a dive bar if “[She] can borrow a comb,” or how promptly a patron spots her sitting alone with no money and says, “I’ll take care of this.” I scribbled stuff like “washed-up cheerleader ponytail,” “WOOLWORTH’S parking lot,” “Mabel Longhetti, Rayette Dipesto…” “pincushion top bun, hand resting on forehead as cigarette burns,” “sitting in back of empty bus,” “sits with knees up at movie theater,” “follows instructions!!!” Soon after, I wrote about the film and Loden, and her marriage to Elia Kazan for This Recording.

At least twice a month this year I watched the same YouTube clip: a 1974 episode of the Dick Cavett Show with guest Lucille Ball. Cavett’s hair looks two days short of a haircut and Lucille is wrapped in a brown Muppet-trimmed jacket. Her legs are crossed away from him, impassive as if sitting at a coffee shop one table over. She turns her torso only slightly to answer his questions, as if saying, “Why are you talking to me?” It’s incredible. But when Cavett recalls the time a Marx brother appeared on her show, Lucille melts. Her eyes roll back as she says his name—“Haaaaaarpo." Pure piety. As Dick sets up the clip, Lucille falls back into her sad clown state, burrowing in her feathers, only to jump at any chance to honor her friend; a "darling man." Mimicking the famous mirror scene in Duck Soup, Lucy, dressed as Harpo, surprises him and matches his every move. Two Harpos. Two distressed top-hats. Two bulb horns. Out-and-out laughs. My face gets mangled with cheer each time.

Mia Hansen-Løve makes moments on screen that I'd like to elope with. Her 2009 feature, Le père de mes enfants, plucks ornament from the everyday—the way three daughters occupy adult spaces, a father's unexpected helplessness, adolescent agonies, a parent's things—and her follow-up, Un amour de jeunesse, kindly plots the elaborate confusion and spectacle of first love and teenage heartbreak. It screened once at IFC and I made sure to see it.

Teenagers, especially French girls, are terrifically soulful characters. Like Sandrine Bonnaire's Suzanne or Virginie Ledoyen as Christine in L'eau Froide, they are rash, sneaky, jumpy, and dip into dark bouts of misery or big dopey loves. Hansen-Løve (who too, looks eternally adolescent and slightly anonymous like a face in a found passport photo) perfectly maneuvers teenage girl unrest. Tethered to a boy who leaves her, Camille (Lola Creton) undergoes grueling grief—inexplicably endless when we're young. But before that—and what Hansen-Løve does so well—Romance is breathless, braless, a series of grand gestures and promises that bank on time never ticking. In one scene, Camille and Sullivan are in the country experiencing an afternoon cold war; she upstairs in bed moping, he outside, somewhere. He returns with food and cooks dinner for the two of them. Later, Camille stumbles downstairs and slides into her chair. She has one bite before slowly crawling across the table's bench which separates them and nudges her head into his neck. All is forgotten, for now. The audience knows that this brief moment of peace is bittersweet and that we cannot will it to last longer.

And finally, here are bits from a November 1993 PREMIERE piece, She’s Done Everything (except direct) by Rachel Abramowitz, about Polly Platt, a woman I truly admire. When she died on July 27th, I read everything I could find on her life.

"Tonight she seems quite ebullient, charged up by her recent discovery of two young filmmakers from Texas… Bottle Rocket makes her giddy….'If I were young, I’d give up everything -boyfriend, home- and go to Texas and beg these guys to let me work on their movie.'

…

"Still, when her ex-husband picks up, all her expansiveness vanishes. She seems to contract into an almost fetal position. Her voice becomes tight, careful. The conversation has a ritualistic quality: all the habits of intimacy, but no longer the trust. She treats him as if he were fragile, thanking him for the flowers he sent her, babying him with the good buzz she’s heard about his latest venture. She tells him about Bottle Rocket. 'It’s in Texas and there’s no Larry McMurtry, but it has a bit of the feel of The Last Picture Show, she says. She asks him to talk to PREMIERE about her. He refuses. 'I’ve been talking all these fucking years about you!' she erupts."

...

"One year later, they packed their meager belongings into a car, along with Platt’s one-eyed dog, Puppy, and set out for L.A., where they soon befriended the auteurs they worshiped. One night, Howard Hawks took the pair out for dinner, along with a beautiful young starlet from Rio Lobo named Sherry Lansing. Toward the end of the meal, Lansing decided to visit the ladies’ room. 'She stood up, and she was gorgeous. And I was not,' says Platt. 'Peter and Howard watched her. She walked to the bathroom, and I remember having Howard on my right and Peter on my left, and their eyes were following her.' As Lansing disappeared from view, Platt recalls, Hawks leaned across her and said, ‘Peter, now that is the kind of girl that you should be with.’ I remember thinking, It’s like I don’t exist.'"

…

"One summer while the children were with Bogdanovich, Platt drank seventeen cases of beer and wrote Pretty Baby."

…

"After sending other emissaries, Brooks asked her personally to produce Broadcast News, which she did. Her all-around dedication to the project renewed her legend for telling detail. Brooks had wanted Broadcast News’ key color to be red; now he was shooting the schoolyard scene where the young Aaron is getting beaten up. He looked up and saw the woman who fifteen years ago had removed the E from a TEXACO sign; she was down on her knees, painting a red accent line on a staircase. 'If you were putting together a baseball team, this is the person you’d kill for,' says Albert Brooks, who played the adult Aaron. 'She can play any position. She can hit; she can pitch.'"

…

"'There are times when I hear Jim talk that I experience something that is so much worse than the jealousy that I felt toward Cybill. I am so envious of his ability to think and express himself that I think I’m going to die. I totally identify with Salieri [in Amadeus], because when he picks up Mozart’s music and starts talking about how brilliant it is, I feel like that’s me. But I don’t have any desire to destroy Jim or Peter or anybody.'"

________________________________

Durga Chew-Bose is a writer living in Brooklyn. She twitters here and tumbls here.

Viewing Log #67: With a bang bang [12/27/10 - 1/2/11]

by Ryland Walker Knight

— in the middle of the bed

• Déjà Vu [Tony Scott, 2006] # This time, I kept thinking about how lazy my initial reaction was, back in Seattle, in 2006, when I thought the film not only crass but offensive. Shows how easy it is to not pay attention to stuff outside story. Shows how much I grew going back to school. Because there are some truly beautiful moments/visions in this film. My favorites are confined to that little room, for the most part, with all the overlays and interactions across that surveillance window screen, but the semi careening at the camera is great and who can forget: yet another Tony Scott movie ending on a freeze frame.
  
  
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind [Steven Spielberg, 1977] # One of the odder Hollywood hits, for sure, that's pretty much all exposition and build up for its entirety. Dreyfus going nuts throwing the yard into the kitchen sink is the only concrete action/scene not spent dancing about, waiting for a concept to emerge. If anything, it's one of the better (more beautiful-looking) arguments about the allure of the concept. There's also a lot of goofball jokes that Steve is always trying really hard to get away with, and always only hitting about half the mark.
  
  
• square shot [Daniel Kasman, 2010] Very conceptual, but also very cool. You can watch it below, if you haven't already (or if you have), and you can read more contextualizing from Danny in the Notebook. I think it's pretty unique but Kevin had a few nice compliments about influences in the comments that are quite clearly a part of the make-up. In any event, as I dropped in there, can't wait for more DKaz words put into images in 20!!.
  
  
• Father of My Children [Mia Hansen-Løve, 2009] # One of the more wonderful films from last year, full of life amidst all those goodbyes. A great way to say goodbye, in fact, to a lot of things. And hello to others.

— expect more like this (and like this)

Viewing Log #43, SFIFF53 #4: The word happy is sad [4/26/10 - 5/2/10]

by Ryland Walker Knight

—Hey ladies!

• Cyrus [Duplass Brothers, 2010] I laughed my butts off and thought all the zooms actually served a purpose in the general uncomfortable zone of these dudes' idea of comedy: one premised on miscommunication and lies and making people squirm. Jonah Hill does deadpan better than most, and maybe better than "wacky" (though his "wacky" in Superbad is pretty great); Marisa Tomei is a babe, still, and this wows me along with every other drooly idiot boy in the audience; guess that's the point, too, since John C Reilly's all wide eyes and goofy "Love! Me!" freak outs most of the way. I'd say see it in theatres if only because that'll probably mean you'll see it with a crowd and being drunk in a crowd of similarly inebriated, jazzed young people definitely added to my pleasure.
  
• I Am Love [Luca Guadagnino, 2009] In one light (the wrong one, duh), this is the silliest movie ever. But in the right light, it's one of the most beautiful: everything baroque expression, an all-caps film brimming with canted angles and swoons and tilts and a score to die for all around Tilda's face. As much a film of affect as INLAND EMPIRE, but to practically opposite ends, with damn near opposite means. That is, both filmmakers score their images to sound how they look but Lynch makes mud cakes with a grin while Guadagnino crafts gourmet plates for twenty with tears. Put otherwise, all the images drip and some rack focus fast and everything's lit to look delicious. I can't wait to see it again. Wish I could see it with a Vitti (or a Tilda, hell) wrapped around me, fingers locked. I'll likely write a real essay when it comes out in wide release.
  
• Senso [Luchino Visconti, 1954] I made a joke on twitter about how I was bored, then I qualified that with a (still-reductive) explanation that I did like the opening—I'm a sucker for stages, and audiences—and the abruptness of the ending, but otherwise I didn't need it or its tableaux of "hurt" or all that "hysteria." And, call me crazy, but I go crazy watching those mouths move out of synch with the soundtrack. Further: the colors are nice, no doubt, but the restoration, which seemed muddied in spots, paled in comparison with the Ray from the day before, which was crisp like new. Could be a print traffic thing, but it seemed more like a print striking thing.
  
  
• To Die Like a Man [João Pedro Rodrigues, 2009] A real film. Maybe not as great as I want it to be, and surely hard to handle in a lot of spots, but boy does it have style. At the Q+A, Rodrigues said he wanted to structure it as a musical comedy but that it was also inspired by Raoul Walsh's Objective, Burma!, which you can sense looking at this scene, but, to be fair, Rodrigues doesn't film any clouds the way Walsh does. What he does film, though, he films especially well. And we all know I'm a sucker for films about performance, and acting, and acting in the world in whatever determination that takes.
  
• The Music Room [Satyajit Ray, 1958] Caveat: got no sleep because of an airport run, so I dozed a few times. The restoration was beautiful. The film's craft was, too. But I tell you what: I'm kind of done with hubris. Doesn't feel tragic.
  
  
• Wild Grass [Alain Resnais, 2009] # At home, looking for images. Image-essay likely coming.
  
  
• White Material [Claire Denis, 2009] Didn't want to believe my buddies who'd seen it previously but, well, yes: this is not her finest two hours. Still ratcheted tight, and a few edits are jarring in the best ways, and murder by machete in any iteration is always terrifying, brutal, gross. Wish there were more ideas, and a better screenplay, but as it is there's just one and a kind of tired narrative structure. The filmmaking structure, however, proves its worth in its angles at end points and the camera's near hush. Every image seems stolen, as if they lucked out every time they turned the camera on and pointed it at things or didn't. The problem, though, with everything pointed inwards, is that it kind of cancels itself, proves its own null. I don't need Claire Denis to tell me about this kind of cesspool.
  
• Wild Grass [Alain Resnais, 2009] Had me from the get-go all the way up and down and around its folles follies to that finale that loops and dips and scans and pushes and soars and zooms and just feels great all inside my body and my brain. Danny was right: maybe the most generous. Dense, as ever, and "typically French," as many numbskulls said walking out, but I see those things as positives. Mileage varies, sure, but when you're flying you cover so much ground!
  
  
• Cold Weather [Aaron Katz, 2010] So much fun. Somehow didn't expect it to be plain entertaining, but it was, and I really had a fun time with it. Since Aaron's a friendly acquaintance, I know I'm a little biased, but I don't think that fraternal thing is necessarily a part of what I dug. More so I loved that it wanted to be, and rightly is, a comedy at heart. Cris Lankenau and Trieste Kelly Dunn really play off one another well, seem to have fun in every scene (even the deadpan, annoyed ones), and I bet a lot of siblings will enjoy seeing this together. Also, Brendan was pretty funny in his cameo. I hope everybody involved gets a spring board off this project.
  
• Father of My Children [Mia Hansen-Løve, 2009] What a lovely little film. Shows a family resemblance to plenty of her country's best, including Pialat (elisions, candor) and Doillon (children and their brains), though her interest in ladies and the importance of being a lady dealing with the weight of men, even as ghosts, is distinctive and maybe even singular. I'll see it again and I'll see her first and I'll write more.

—Drive, die