Next weekend, I'm taking some vacation time and heading back to Nashville, just in time for the Nashville Film Festival-- which has proven to be a worthy investment of time in recent years and will doubtlessly be so again. And in case anyone reads my blog for info about independant films (as opposed to reading it because you are either a person who likes me or a person who is related to me (thanks, Mom!)), never fear! If there's a hot spot somewhere in the lobby of the Green Hills Commons 16, you'll doubtlessly find me there with my laptop. Maybe Jim Ridley, my movie-writing hero, will spot me and offer me a job. How cool would it be to get paid to write the sort of gobbledegook I spew out here where the brown rabbits roam?
In the meantime, here are a couple of short commentaries on a couple of older movies that I love:
The other night on cable, they showed one of my old favorites-- Marguerite Duras' The Lover. Duras is a writer I love because she is so very good at taking a couple of my fascinations-- sex and racial discontent-- and irrevocably entangling them with a unique and gorgeous poetic sensibility. In Hiroshima, Mon Amour, she goes so far as to name her two lovers after the cities from with they come: Nevers, France and Hiroshima, Japan. And in this way, that which is intimate becomes that which is geographic and sociological. Hiroshima, Mon Amour is another great film I'd highly recommend to anyone who hasn't seen it-- black and white, tragic, full of regret, and simply beautiful.
But, The Lover, a quasi-autobiographical story, is more invested in its erotic narrative than its politics... and yet, the politics persistently thrust themselves into its foreground. The basic story is one of a 15-year-old French girl, living in in Sa-Dec, outside of Saigon, who meets a wealthy Chinese man and begins a rigorous--and I mean RIGOROUS-- affair with him. The real tension of the story come out of the fact that, while her family rapidly becomes dependant on his money, they assume superiority over him for no good reason other than that they are white. And at the same time, he cannot acknowledge his sexual obsession with the girl, which he sort of pathetically insists is Love (capital L) despite her emotional unavailability, in any public sort of way because it is, or course, culturally unacceptable for him to engage with any woman who isn't a Chinese virgin (oh, to be a Chinese virgin...). The tension that results from both the Chinese characters and the French characters each assuming they they are socially superior to the other supplies the story with a wistful tone of doom-- but, while this tension is really just an undercurrent to the more overt soft-porn aspect of this film, it's really what makes it worth watching again and again and again. And in Jeanne Moreau's narrating voiceovers, you get to hear little snatches of Duras' liquidy prose... and, oh, how that makes me want to read the book all over again and again and again.
And then there's Sex, Lies, and Videotape. If you haven't seen it in a while, rent it again. It's friggin' brilliant. It's one of Steven Soderbergh's early directing efforts and it shows potential that he's been a little hit-or-miss about acheiving ever since. Its pacing is so unflinching and intense that it builds a sort of suspense from which most thriller-writers would do well to learn. And though this movie was made in '89 and is about a now obsolete video recording device, it has become, I think, even more relevant now than ever. What I mean is, there's an ever-present anxiety/desire that the private thoughts, cravings, images that we send back and forth to each other will somehow surface for the purposes of public inspection. People make sex tapes of themselves and post them on the web; people exchange flirtatious emails via their Outlook systems at work with full knowledge that their companies hire email spies; people fix their hair and pick their butts in the mirrored domes of drugstore security cameras. It's like so many of us are dying to spill out our secrets to anyone who'll listen or watch-- and yet the surveillance anxiety persists, too. Last week, my team at work had a meeting in a room set up for focus groups-- complete with cameras in the corners, drop-down microphones and one of those single-sided mirrored windows-- and I felt nervous during the entire meeting that someone was on the other side of that mirror. And while this movie came out of a pre-internet era, it feels as though it anticipates all of the anxieties of early 21ist Century life.
Beyond that, James Spader is just so damn good. The character isn't as unabashedly freakish as some of his subsequent roles but he's not exactly well-adjusted either. The movie's pacing allows him so many conversational awkwardnesses and silences that a lesser actor might have been tempted to fill with chatter-- but Spader just lets the space between people become corpulent in its discomfort.
Seriously. Pull one of these off the shelf while you're breathlessly awaiting the results of my film festival samplings. They deserve revisitation. But I shan't keep you waiting for long, even anyway, my dear devoted readers (um... yeah, that's still just you, Mom!).
1 comment:
As an addendum to my above list of ways in which we breach our own privacy, let me just note that a person from my office recently informed me that Paris Hilton apparently left her coat at a club... with some sort of gizmo designed for self-gratification in the pocket. So, there it is! Out there for public consumption.
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